iPhone Flash Player progress confirmed

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 01 October 2008 03:50

Business IT - Technology

The release of Adobe Flash for Apple's iPhone might not be imminent, but it may be more than a mirage on the horizon if the two companies can come to terms.

Flash is Adobe's multimedia software commonly used for animated and interactive components in web pages. Adobe claims the Flash Player is installed on 99 percent of "Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets" and Flash Lite is on over 500 million non-PC devices.

Whether Flash on the iPhone would be a good thing or not is debatable. Obviously some of iTWire's advertisers would like you to be able to see their ads when you visit the site with an iPhone!

But some Flash animations are resource hogs and are capable of sucking the life out of a Core 2 Duo based system, so what would they do to the relatively low power CPU in the iPhone? Sure, the problem is badly written Flash content, but it's out there on the web.

That said, one of the biggest criticisms of the Safari web browser on the iPhone is that it does not include Flash support, and therefore cannot deliver the full web experience. Indeed, the UK Advertising Standards Authority ordered Apple to cease running a TV ad that stated "all the parts of the internet are on the iPhone" as the handset supports neither Flash nor Java.

In March this year, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan told analysts "We’ve evaluated the [iPhone] SDK, we can now start to develop the Flash Player ourselves."

Adobe officials later stated that "to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it", and expressed a desire to work with Apple on the project.

Trouble is, Apple has been very negative about Flash for the iPhone. The company has encouraged web developers to support only standards-based content (eg, H.264 video) in pages that may be viewed on the iPhone.

Three months later, Narayan told analysts that it had developed a version that was working on the computer-based iPhone emulator. The challenge of getting the software to run on the iPhone itself was still ahead.

So what's the latest news, and what might be stopping Flash from making an early appearance on the iPhone? Please read on.