After a nearly endless stream of hearsay and rumors on the matter, Adobe has now gone on the record about Flash on the iPhone. During a presentation at the Flash on the Beach expo today in the UK, Adobe’s Senior Director of Engineering Paul Betlem mentioned that the Flash development team was actively working on a release for the iPhone, but due to the closed nature of the handset, the final call would be Apple’s.
Betlem didn’t specify whether Adobe is working on embedding Flash within the Safari browser, or if Flash playback would require a standalone application. While Apple has yet to allow any sort of plug-in to run within Safari, making the exception for Flash may be necessary.
Either way, full Flash integration would be an especially huge selling point for the iPhone. Love it or hate it, much of the general population has grown to see Flash as an integral part of the browser experience. With browsers on other platforms now offering support for the format, Apple needs to take advantage of Adobe’s interest while Flash is still a determining factor in the mobile browser battle.
Update: Feelings on the announcement are mixed; Jason Kincaid of our parent site, TechCrunch, doesn’t necessarily feel that Flash is the way to go. From his post:
“These days, most of us use Flash primarily to view videos on sites like Hulu, YouTube, and CNN. Flash on the iPhone may give us access to all of these sites (assuming its CPU can handle video), but I’d rather see native applications for each of these media hubs similar to what YouTube has created. Flash is notoriously CPU-intensive, which is the last thing the iPhone needs with its already lackluster battery life – native apps would allow for H.264 video playback on the phone’s Quicktime player that would probably require only a fraction of the CPU cycles.”
What say you, avid users of the mobile web?
[Via Flash Magazine]
This is the thing that keeps Apple’s browser from being better than MicroB. If they added Flash, I’d be inclined to pick up another Touch.
Put a flash card reader on the iPhone – THAT would motivate me enough to buy one!
By the look of things the next round of WM will have Flash support so Apple is going to get bullied into this whether they like it or not.
The beauty of WM is you don’t have to wait around for Microsoft to put Flash in the browser. Skyfire already supports Flash. I believe Opera Mobile is slated to as well.
That’s true I have skyfire and it’s great, but it would be nice to have the device do it natively without having to run fetch from a 3rd party server.
All the iPhone is missing is the ability to run Yahoo Fantasy Sports Stattracker – and Flash would enable that. I’m definitely for Adobe adding Flash support.
My understanding is that Apple will not allow apps that interpret code, which is essentially what Flash does, so I cannot see it being released as a stand alone app.
The reasoning for this is obvious – it allows a method to bypass the app store, and release apps for the iPhone without going down Apples approved route.
If Flash for iPhone were released, then developers could simply develop apps for Flash for iPhone, and this is what Apple want to avoid.
For similar reasons I doubt it will come as a plugin, as then we are likely to see things such as iPhone game sites appear, where developers write flash games targeted at the iPhone, which are available to play on dedicated sites. Again, Apple loses control, which is clearly not what they want.
I say give us flash and what ever else we want like copy and paste!
This is great news for anyone wanting to deliver brand experiences on mobile phones – it’s just a shame we still don’t know when it will happen. The powerful combination of the iPhone interface with the rich interactivity of Flash is something agencies, marketers and consumers will find hard to resist. Interestingly, we can also envisage a potential cost saving for clients as pre-existing Flash content is repurposed for mobile.
At present, it looks like there is only talk about the Flash plug-in on the Safari web browser. As such, Flash widgets per se are not really on the cards yet. Native iPhone widgets/applications in Flash are still a good while away, but we wait with anticipation for the opportunity to use this new technology.
I can’t imagine flash running that well on an iphone. 600mhz is not going to be enough to make it a good experience. I figure they will be able to pull off decent video playback but that is probably it.
For fun Find someone with an older computer (like 1ghz range) and go look at any modern flash site. The cpu will jump to 100% and it will be a slide show.
I am pretty sure that is an experience apple does not want on their device.