Apple's deigned to let Skyfire, an iOS browser that transcodes Flash videos into iPhone-friendly HTML5, into the App Store, and it's available there now. In my testing it worked pretty darn well. Yup, porntubes on the iPhone. Updated
Other iterations of Skyfire have been known to be clunky, but their new $3 app works as advertised: when you come across a site with a Flash video element it'll send that video out to its servers, transcode it into iPhone-friendly HTML5, and pipe it back to your iPhone. It takes 10 seconds or so to get itself situated, but once it does, the videos look pretty good. Skyfire's magic doesn't work with Flash games or Flash apps, or some premium sites like Hulu, but for the most part you'll be able to get at all the Flash video you come across while browsing, or the Flash videos you discover with the built-in Skybar feature. $3 [iTunes]
Update: Skyfire's temporarily unavailable for download. According to a post on their official blog, they're essentially "sold out," whatever that means (probably that they don't have the server mojo to keep things going:
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.