Adobe Flash Coming to iPhone, Whether Apple Likes It or Not
Posted 01/11/2010 at 8:35am
| by J.R. Bookwalter

Love it or hate it, Adobe Flash is finally making the leap from the desktop to handheld devices in a big way this year -- including the iPhone, whether or not Apple wants to bless its existence.
Adobe announced back in October of last year that the next version of its Flash developer tools (part of Creative Suite 5, which is now in private beta testing) will include a “Packager for iPhone” to convert Flash apps into iPhone apps. That’s good news to the 2 million Flash developers already in existence,
according to TechCrunch.
The competition is heating up, with Adobe offering a public demo last week of Flash running on Google’s Nexus One, and Palm announcing that the next update to WebOS will also include Flash for the Pre and Pixi. Apple’s excuses for the lack of Flash on the iPhone have been numerous (even though they’re all valid): It’s too slow, it’s a battery hog and it’s not capable enough.
Of course,
as TechCrunch notes, Apple’s biggest concern about Flash relates more to its own iPhone SDK -- they simply didn’t want a competing developer platform to get in the way of their own. But they may no longer have a choice, if Adobe CS5 makes good on its promise to easily convert Flash apps to iPhone apps. Microsoft is also planning a similar tactic for Silverlight, so the heat is on.
Apple has an estimated 125,000 or so iPhone developers, which pales in comparison to the installed base of 2 million Adobe Flash developers. While none of them can magically make Flash apps and video start playing in Mobile Safari, once the Flash-to-iPhone app floodgates open, Apple may have little choice but to embrace Flash or risk some of its iPhone OS developers jumping ship.
For their part, Adobe has been streamlining the mobile version of Flash to address the common complaints about the desktop version. Here’s hoping the two can put aside their differences, put their heads together and provide the best experience for Flash on any mobile device yet!