Existing users, 
Adobe official confirms Flash for the iPhone, says Apple will decide when
Posted 30 September 2008 @ 9am in News
Our friend Jens Chr Brynildsen, a Flash expert who maintains a number resources for the standard including Flash Magazine, has reportedly confirmed with Adobe Systems’ Sr. Director of Engineering, Paul Betlem, that Flash is coming to the iPhone. However, Betlem says that “Apple calls the shots as to when it’ll be available.”
Brynildsen got the confirmation at an Adobe Town Hall meeting session. He reports:
“Upon a direct question from the audience, Paul Betlem for the first time publicly confirmed that Adobe is actively developing a Flash Player for Apple’s popular phone. He said (not direct quote) ‘My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.’ He noted that Apple makes all the decisions, so in other words, the ball is in Apple’s yard at this time. If Apple says yes, Adobe will have the player available in a very short time.”
In mid-June, Adobe’s CEO said that company already has Flash running on an iPhone emulator (presumably the same emulator included with Apple’s iPhone SDK).
As we’ve pointed out several times, Flash performance and usage is abysmal on current mobile devices that support playback. Mobile device processors — including the iPhone’s — simply aren’t fast enough to handle most Flash-laden sites. Flash Lite, the scaled down standard designed specifically for mobile devices, is even too much for most devices, and isn’t widely used.
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9 Comments
Posted by deviladv1974
30 September 2008 @ 10am
I see two outcomes of this. One is the obvious that we eventually get a flash player for the iphone.
However, the other is that Adobe is trying to make Apple look bad. For example, Adobe says “hey we got a player working just fine!” but they don’t admit that the player is as bloated as it normally is and only works in the emulator because the emulator has the power of the PC it’s running on behind it, but the iPhone chip isn’t beefy enough to take it.
Adobe will gamble that their claim is well received, and that Apple’s counter claim will not be well crafted enough to counter this, and opinion over the Flash player will tip further towards Apple being the bad guys here.
Posted by phillipk
30 September 2008 @ 10am
Old news… as their PR guy explained:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oHDtXmmEWU
Posted by Stefan Offermann
30 September 2008 @ 12pm
Wanted to clarify one thing here in regard to your statement about Flash Lite not being widely used. More than 800 million Flash Lite enabled mobile devices have shipped worldwide so far (as of Sept. ‘08) and we expect 1 Billion devices to ship with Flash by Q1 ‘09 - one year ahead of schedule. More info at adobe.com/mobile
Stefan Offermann
Adobe PR
Posted by jakobwithak
30 September 2008 @ 1pm
I really hope that Apple decides to release some sort of Flash player for the iPhone. There are millions of websites that can’t be visited due to this. But knowing this company they will wait till the next generation of the iPhone, but hey, what a great selling point.
Posted by jameskatt
30 September 2008 @ 7pm
Adobe should first develop Flash for the Android. Ha hah.
Flash for mobile devices should be equal in features to the desktop - not the cut down and useless Flash Lite.
Once Flash runs on Android - and there should be no reason it should be blocked - we will see once and for all whether or not it is feasible.
Note that Android runs at 300 MHz - half of the iPhone 3G’s speed.
Flash will never be O.K.’d on the iPhone. First of all, it breaks the SDK’s rules by running code. Second, it poses a security threat by running code not approved by Apple. Third, Safari doesn’t have a plug-in architecture on the iPhone. Flash can’t even attach to Safari. Fourth, Flash is NOT a open-source web standard. It makes Apple dependent on Adobe for updates. Adobe has a poor track record when it comes to it’s Apple products. Adobe likes to cripple its Apple products compared to the PC products, and produce them later than the PC Product. Thus Flash - when it runs on multiple platforms - makes Apple uncompetitive. An Fifth, Flash is a resource hog. With the iPhone only having about 100 MB of RAM for all applications, the hog that Flash is would slow down everything else besides itself running too slowly. This makes it unacceptable.
Since the full-featured Flash doesn’t even run on Windows Mobile, Adobe has no case for Flash on the iPhone 3G.
Posted by br8thw8
30 September 2008 @ 11pm
Why doesn’t Apple let us decide if we want to use Flash?
Here are the two scenarios when we attempt to go to a website that has Flash:
1 - The iPhone has no Flash capability and so we don’t get to see anything.
or
2 - The iPhone has Flash capability and we either get to see the info if fast, or if too slow, we don’t get to see anything.
Uh, might as well give us Flash then. I’d rather get it to work some of the time than none of the time!
Posted by foo339
1 October 2008 @ 7am
> first develop Flash for the Android. Ha hah.
No, what Adobe should do is ship AIR or something like it for the iPhone so that developers have an alternative to buying a Mac and learning Objective-C.
With so many iPhones out there, and so many people proficient in Flash, it seems like a real win situation for Adobe. And compiled to true native code, Flash authored applications wouldn’t break any SDK/Apple Developer rules.
Posted by Chris71485
5 October 2008 @ 11am
iPhone and iPod touch need Flash so bad, there are so many things done in Flash on the Internet these days, that this is a major needed upgrade for the Apple products… and Apple must be aware that this would be a huge plus and a big step on the smartphone/iPod market; a lot of people (including me) feel the lack of Flash on their Apple gadgets and it’s not at all a good feeling
Posted by k.kopriva
11 November 2008 @ 3pm
There is one way ho to watch flash videos directly from the iphone. You can try this tutorial:
http://en.vimjak.cz/iphone/how-to-play-flash-videos-on-the-iphone