iPhone Flash

This just in from my friend Jonathan.

"If there’s been one thing iPhone users have griped to Apple for since the launch of the iPhone (well, aside from copy/paste), it’s been Flash. With a huge portion of the web relying on the technology to operate, (especially all the fun stuff: videos, games, etc.) the absence of the ubiquitous web technology on the iPhone is a major handicap. But not for much longer. If interviews are to be believed, Adobe has been developing Flash for the iPhone since June, and has been collaborating with Apple since late last year.

The iPhone presents a unique challenge because you can’t simply port a current version of Flash and expect it to work. The full-blown Flash player (supposedly) requires too much horsepower, while Flash Lite really doesn’t the features people are going to expect from the player (complex animation, etc.). So you have to code have a custom version of Flash Player—no big deal. Adobe’s had to deal with crazier things.

The real issue, and the reason many feel that Flash will never happen on the iPhone, is the power of Flash apps and the danger they pose to Apple’s iron grip on the App Store. If you’re too lazy to read the article, the basic argument is that Flash/Flex apps can do almost everything regular iPhone apps are capable of. With Flash on the iPhone, AS3 and Flex developers are basically given a free pass: no reason to learn the iPhone SDK, no reason to put up with all the crazy App Store guidelines. Just code and deploy on the web. This would allow for a wide variety of competing services that would inevitably divert money from App Store publishers and, in some cases, Apple itself.

Despite all this, rumors say that Flash is working in the Apple Labs just fine. And that’s no surprise. We’ve seen other devices with far less processing power run Flash Players with AS2, so anyone who argues that the iPhone can’t run Flash 9 with AS3 (sure it has more features, but AS3 is SO much faster) is deluded or lying. So when Steve Jobs announces a couple of days ago that Flash won’t be coming to the iPhone because it’s “too slow,” it’s obvious that Apple and Adobe are having some sort of power struggle behind the scenes. Though Apple wants the general public to believe it’s simply a technical hurdle that can’t be overcome, I think it’s a political move to put them in a better bargaining position. The link above details some interesting theories for the reasoning behind the announcement (including a very plausible conflict over which company’s PDF renderer to use).
Flash on the iPhone is a reality. It’s not a matter of if we’ll be getting it—it’s a matter of when. The real question is how much Adobe will have to concede to Apple (and how much they’ll have to cripple Flash’s functionality) before it will happen."