The latest example: Skyfire, the smartphone browser that lets you watch some Flash videos on an iPhone. It hit the App Store on Wednesday. Then throngs of people read about it and downloaded it. The app, which is as much a service as a piece of software–it relies servers which translate Flash video into an iPhone-friendly format on the fly–stopped working in any sort of satisfactory way, and its creators yanked it from the App Store.

Now it’s back, sort of –they’re letting in new users in drips and drabs by putting Skyfire on the App Store and then taking it down and then putting it up again. (It seems to be up at the moment.)

At least a couple of eerily similar stories from earlier this year spring to mind:

* In March, Line2, a VoIP app that did a clever job of working around the iPhone’s limitations, debuted, got a glowing review from the New York Times’ David Pogue, and then had severe problems registering new users, at least in part because of a weird denial-of-service attack. Line2 publisher Toktumi pulled the program from the App Store and started letting in users in small batches, and eventually recovered.

* In July, iPad “social magazine” Flipboard launched , got a flurry of enthusiastic coverage, and then suffered server overload that left many users unable to get the app working at all. Its creators reacted in much the same way as the Line2 folks. (They also felt so bad about the whole thing that they canceled their launch party.)

Skyfire, Toktumi, and Flipboard are all small companies; all make apps that rely on a service behind the scenes; all got tons of attention and downloads when they hit Apple’s devices. The nature of Apple’s platforms–millions of users voraciously downloading apps with great ease from the App Store–means that a hit app can go from no users to vast numbers of users in a jiffy, in a way that was less likely to happen on past platforms, and still doesn’t seem to happen on Android or other phone OSes.

Adequately prepping for the onslaught appears to be really tough, and it’s only going to get tougher as more and more people buy these devices.

Then again, both Toktumi and Flipboard managed to recover from their bumpy debuts, so it’s not as if it’s impossible to throw enough technology at this problem to fix it. Maybe they should open side businesses helping other startups sidestep the initial meltdown?

Wanna watch Flash video on your iPhone? If you sit around waiting for Apple and Adobe to make nice isn’t worth the effort, you’re going to grow moss. But a partial solution is available today: Skyfire, a browser that can play some Flash-based video that’s not otherwise available on iOS devices. Apple has approved it, and it’s now on the App store for $2.99.

As with the Android version that came out last spring (before FlashPlayer itself shipped for Android), the iPhone edition of the browser scans Web pages for Flash-based video. In many–but not all–cases, it’ll pop up a thumbnail video icon, which means that it can play a version of the video converted into the iPhone’s H.264 format. Click on the icon, and Skyfire will buffer and play the video.

Skyfire isn’t a miracle cure for unplayable iOS video. The watching process isn’t exactly seamless: When I sampled video at Comedy Central, ESPN, PCWorld, and other sites, it took from a few second up to about ninety seconds before video started to play, and it was sometimes a bit jumpy before settling down. Some sites, such as Hulu and network ones, are blocking this browser, and others, it just doesn’t support. Just as important, major sites are doing an increasingly good job of supporting iOS devices natively–as I bopped around the Web looking for video to watch, I found that more than I expected was playable with Safari (no conversion process required) as well as Skyfire. Basically, its a little hard to know what you’ll get until you land on a page. But the browser does indeed let you watch some big-name stuff that’s otherwise unavailable, and therefore serves a purpose for now. (I assume the day will come when Flash-only video is as rare as RealPlayer-only video is today.)

Like the Android version of Skyfire, this one utilizes the WebKit rendering engine built into the operating system but layers its own set of features on top. It has a bunch of  items that Safari lacks, including the ability to quickly switch between mobile and full versions of Web sites; sharing via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail; a private browsing mode; and a related-pages feature that wasn’t too useful when I tried it. If you find Safari skimpy on features, you might prefer this browser. (My go-to iPhone browser, however, remains Atomic Web Browser, the most desktop-like one I’ve found.)

I must confess that spend virtually no time moping about the lack of Flash on the iPhone. I am, however, a fan of browser choice and competition–so I consider the availability of Skyfire, Atomic Web Browser, Opera Mini, and others on the iPhone as good news. If you give it a try, let us know what you think.

Like Opera Mini, earlier versions of Skyfire for Windows Mobile and Symbian were proxy browsers that compressed Web pages on the server side before transferring them to the phone. With this Android edition, the Skyfire folks are shifting strategy. Android’s Webkit-based rendering engine is already capable of displaying Web pages swiftly and accurately, they figure, so they’re not trying to duplicate it. Skyfire for Android uses the same Webkit rendering that Android’s default browser does–but rolls it into a browser with a bunch more features.

The most notable of these new capabilities is Flash video playback. For that, Skyfire still uses a proxy approach: When you come to pages with Flash videos, it identifies them, compresses them, and converts them to H.264 and HTML5, then transfers them to your phone for playback. In other words, it’s getting around Android’s current lack of Flash support by turning Flash video into something that Android can support. (Other Flash content, such as games and irritating welcome user interfaces on restaurant sites, aren’t supported.)

In my tests with a prerelease version of Skyfire 2.0 supplied to me by the company, this worked wonderfully well when it worked at all. When Skyfire notices videos it can play, it pops up a notice in its “SkyBar” icon bar. Click on it, and it does the conversion (which takes from a few seconds to around a minute) and playback. Over Wi-Fi, videos played in full-screen mode and looked terrific; over 3G, they didn’t look quite as good, but were still respectable. I watched videos at YouTube (which Android does support natively), DailyMotion, Metacafe, Vimeo, ABC.com, CBS.com, Revision3, PCWorld.com, and other sites this way, including ones embedded in blogs.

Skyfire says it supports “millions” of videos–but in my tests with this version, there were scads that didn’t work, including all the ones at NYTimes.com, CNN.com, Gizmodo, and other sites, and some of the ones at other sites. (I had trouble with longer ABC.com videos, for example, and one blog had one embedded Vimeo video that worked and another that didn’t.) Sometimes Skyfire didn’t seem to notice the videos were there at all; sometimes it saw them, but the conversion failed. In either case, I only discovered that there were problems when I tried and failed, which was annoying.

Oh, and Hulu doesn’t work–not because there are technical issues, but because Hulu blocks Skyfire, along with everything else that isn’t a desktop browser. Sigh.

Skyfire says that it’s working to add support for more sites, and the browser has a feature you can use to notify it of stuff that’s not behaving properly. With any luck, it’ll get the feature to the point where attempting to check out video feels less like a crapshoot than it does now.

Even with spotty video support, Skyfire beats Android’s default browser on multiple fronts in terms of sheer features. It lets you view any site in Desktop, Android, or iPhone mode–extremely handy for sites that deliver different variants to different browsers, but not always the version you want. An Explore option lets you browse videos, tweets, and other items relating to terms on the page you’re on. There are also more prominent features for sharing pages via Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or text message than in the default browser. You can choose to have it clear the cache when you exit, allowing for a primitive form of private browsing. And pinch-to-zoom is supported, at least on my Droid.

I found rough spots in some of these areas, too–for instance, the viewer that lets you jump between multiple pages seemed to have problems rendering thumbnail images. And the browser sometimes got bogged down and unresponsive. Overall, though, Skyfire is rife with promise–if the company can polish it up and get it to support more videos, it has a shot at being Android’s best browser, even in a race that now includes the default browser, Opera Mini, and Firefox, among others.

Will Skyfire remain distinctive once Adobe’s official Flash Player hits Android? Maybe–a Skyfire executive told me that the Adobe player doesn’t do the server-side compression and optimization that Skyfire performs before sending video to the phone. I worried a bit about Skyfire’s approach scaling if the browser becomes popular on Android, but the executive told me that the company is already delivering 25 million minutes of video a month to users of its other versions.

Oh, and one other thing: Yes, Skyfire is working on an iPhone version. It’s similar to the Android one–it uses the iPhone’s Webkit rendering engine, for instance–and the company intends to submit it to Apple in the second quarter of this year. Does it stand a chance of being accepted, and thereby giving iPhone owners the Flash video support that Adobe isn’t permitted to deliver? I’m placing no bets–but keep your fingers crossed. We know that Steve Jobs hates Flash but loves HTML5, so there’s at least a tiny chance he’d be pleased by a Skyfire that ran well on an iPhone.

Some images of Skyfire for Android in action (or, in the last example, not in action):

Wonder how Apple (not to mention Adobe) would feel about that?

Spy shots: Skyfire’s BlackBerry browser.

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