At 9 AM ET on Thursday, November 4, the Skyfire Browser will be coming to iOS and will allow users to watch Flash video on their iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch by converting it to HTML5.
Priced at $2.99, Skyfire Browser has been available on Android devices since May 2010, and has been incredibly popular with 1.5 million downloads. Now, after a “rather rigorous review,” Apple has finally approved the app for iOS devices, and it will soon be available in the App Store.
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The app gets around Apple’s ban of Adobe Flash by using Skyfire’s servers to download the Flash video and convert it to HTML5. However, a report by CNNMoney profiling the application has found that it won’t work with Flash-based games, or the popular TV streaming service Hulu.
The report explains:
Like the Android version, Skyfire for iOS isn’t a standalone application, but rather a tool that works on top of Apple’s Safari Web browser. As a result, the company said the app received a rather rigorous review from Apple, but it was approved in less than two months. Apple did not return a request for comment on why it approved Skyfire for its App Store.
Skyfire Browser won’t allow you to play games, because they require interactivity and the application doesn’t support that. And Hulu has blocked Skyfire, as it would give users free access to the service that is otherwise $10 per month for the Hulu Plus application.
Steve Jobs made it clear in April that Apple would not be supporting Adobe Flash on its iOS devices, and many websites have begun to offer content in both Flash and HTML5. A recent study showed than more than half of video on the Web is now available in the Apple-approved HTML5 format.
