Adobe Brings Flash Apps To iPhone

The Apple Adobe saga has gone for more than it’s had to. The two companies went back and forth for months over Adobe Flash. Apple has been tough on Adobe over Flash. The company is not completely opposed to having Flash available on iPhone but it still believes that Flash is too resource-intensive and will take away from the Apple iPhone experience, more than it adds to it anyways. In its latest release, Adobe has addressed some of those “resource” issues, making Adobe Flash more suitable for mobile phones. While all other major smart-phones are going to fully support Flash, Apple has still opted out of allowing a full Flash revolution to happen on its smartphone.

Adobe has tried to work with Apple over all the issues that Flash may cause on iPhone but Apple has simply been not receptive. Many experts have compared Apple’s treatment of Adobe to that of Google. Adobe, for its part, has taken yet another shot at Apple for blocking Adobe Flash Player on iPhone:

Apple restricts use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod touch.

Adobe Flash Player may not be coming to the iPhone, but iPhone developers will now be able to port their games to the iPhone platform using Adobe CS5 technology. Here is what Adobe folks had to say about this:

So how do you build an application for the iPhone? It’s simple, really. The forthcoming beta of Adobe Flash Professional CS5 incorporates the ability to create an iPhone application. You have access to nearly all the AIR 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 APIs.

That is certainly good news as developers get to write native Flash apps for iPhone. But if you are planning to develop browser-based apps for iPhone, you are out of luck. Adobe had this to say about browser-based Flash apps:

The new support for iPhone applications in the Flash Platform tooling will not allow iPhone users to browse web content built with Flash technology on iPhone. Flash Player uses a just-in-time compiler and virtual machine within a browser plug-in to play back Flash content on websites. Those technologies are not allowed on the iPhone at this time, so a Flash Player for iPhone is not being made available today.

Unlike many iPhone owners, I am a big fan of Flash applications. It’d be great if Apple and Adobe worked something out so we could all get to experience Flash apps to their fullest on our phones. But Apple has been too controlling in the past, and it continues to be so. Adobe has shown in the past few months that it is willing to work hard to bring Flash to the iPhone platform, but it won’t be able to fully accomplish that without Apple’s help. While I can’t see Apple changing its stance on Flash anytime soon, it’s encouraging that the company is not going out of its way to make life difficult for Adobe. Or has it?