Skyfire for iPhone has been received with unbelievable enthusiasm. Despite our best attempts and predictions, the demand far exceeds our initial projections.
The user experience was performing well for the first few hours, but as the surge continued, the peak load on our servers and bandwidth caused the video experience to degrade.
Thus we are effectively ‘sold out’ and will temporarily not accept new purchases from the App Store. We are working really hard to increase capacity and will be accepting new purchases from the App Store as soon as we can support it.
We are very grateful for the demand. Within 5 hours, Skyfire for iPhone became the top grossing app, the third highest paid app overall and the top application in the Utilities category. Wow!
Please bear with us as we bring our capacity in line with the incredible demand – stay tuned.
Thanks, Robert.
Skyfire: Spinning a Potential Disaster into a Great Story While Creating Demand and Urgency in the Process
November 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment
I just read a post (below) about how Skyfire “sold out” in the Apple App Store. I was clearly taken aback because how is it possible that a digital product could sell out. As you can read below demand for their app clearly out stripped the “supply” of their infrastructure.
In case you don’t know what skyfire is, it’s an alternative browser for iOS that allows you to play flash by transcoding it on the fly into a non-banned format stream. Pretty nifty.
When they do start releasing more batches, users will no doubt jump on the chance to buy it before it “sells out” again, thus creating more demand and urgency in a possibly repeating cycle. Bravo.
From the Skyfire blog:
