Adobe and Apple working on Flash on the iPhone together

It's now confirmed that Adobe and Apple are now working together to bring Flash to the iPhone. In an interview with Bloomberg News today, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen hinted that the iPhone CPU is the main problem and that "The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver".

We've written about Flash on the iPhone before and up until now, most industry insiders have thought that it wouldn't be possbile to bring Flash to the iPhone. There are several good reasons for Apple to prevent Flash on the iPhone. It would break their consistent UI experience, it could pose a threat to the iTunes distribution model and the low specs of the phone itself. Steve Jobs himself said almost a year ago that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and a mobile version called Flash Lite "is not capable of being used with the Web".

Meanwhile, Adobe have been working on a custom version of the Flash Player for the iPhone. This player has never been released to the public and todays Bloomberg story hints at the reason it's still not released. Shantanu says "It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating". We'd guess from this that it is indeed the slow processor in the iPhone that is the culprit. Initial speculations indicated that the iPhone had a 620Mhz CPU. Later reports adjusted that down to about 400Mhz. Several years ago I did Flash development on iPaq handhelds with similar chips and that was a speed-wise nighmare. Flash just won't run fast enough on that. We guess all we can do is to wish the Adobe Flash Player engineers the best of luck. (via AppleInsider)

In other iPhone + Flash news the previous week, the owners of Riastats.com found useragents reporting to be Flash Player 9 on the iPhone. This story was later pulled as Adobe's John Dowell posted a comment that pointed out that Adobe are only working on Flash Player 10 for devices (to bring all versions of the player up to the same feature set). This could certainly happen though, so keep an eye on your server stats...

 

 

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