Adobe abandons Flash for iPhone packager development

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 22 April 2010 10:26

IT Industry - Strategy

Adobe has drawn a line under the use of Flash to create iPhone apps, and is turning its attention to Google's Android mobile platform.

Just before Adobe shipped Creative Suite 5, Apple changed the iPhone developer agreement to require that "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript".

The problem for Adobe was that CS5 includes the capability to generate native iPhone apps from Flash. More than 100 apps developed with a beta release of the tool were already available from the App Store.

The timing of Apple's announcement did make it seem as if Adobe was the real target, even though the change was aligned with the release of the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK.

Adobe has now thrown in the towel: "We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature," wrote Adobe's principal product manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform, Mike Chambers in a blog post.

Chambers said that the knowledge and experienced gained in the creation of the Flash packager for iPhone are being applied to the development of Flash Player and Air for mobile operating systems, notably Android.

He is also shifting his personal development efforts. "I am going to shift all of my mobile focus from iPhone to Android based devices (I am particularly interested in the Android based tablets coming out this year) and not focus on the iPhone stuff as much anymore. This includes both Flash based, and Objective-C based iPhone development," he wrote.