Adobe iPhone Flash – only if Adobe gives Apple some flashy cash?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 20 March 2008 00:33

Your IT - Mobility

First it was Sun promising to make Java on iPhone a reality, now Adobe says they’ve also read the SDK tealeaves and say that iPhone Flash is possible – but would Apple ever allow it?

The Abode ‘earnings call’ transcript over at Seeking Alpha has news resulting from an analyst question that Adobe wants to bring Flash to the iPhone.

While Adobe has wanted to bring Flash to the iPhone for some time, Steve Jobs has said that the full version of Flash for desktop browers is simply ‘too heavy’ for the iPhone, while FlashLite 3.0 – just licensed by Microsoft for their Windows Mobile platform – is not powerful enough.

Although Jobs said there was a ‘missing product’ in the Flash lineup, i.e. a version of Flash that would work smoothly and fast on the iPhone, Abode’s President and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, has done a Sun, and is promising something that it would seem Apple has already rejected from the iPhone’s third party software capabilities.

You see, both Flash and Java can call up their own independent code and run it in the Flash or Java environment. If this were to happen on the iPhone, software developers could theoretically bypass Apple’s SDK (software development kit) and create programs which could run on the iPhone without interference, acceptance or denial by Apple.

Apple you probably already know, Apple strictly prohibited third party code from launching other executable code. In a previous article on Sun wanting to get Java onto the iPhone, we quoted a MacRumors story which had part of the Apple iPhone SDK agreement.

In part, this agreement noted that: “No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)… An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise.”

So quite how Sun or Adobe can get around this limitation is clearly yet to be seen.

So, what was the analyst’s question that saw Adobe’s CEO suggest they would ‘work with Apple’ to get Flash on the iPhone after all? Please read onto page 2.