Flash for smartphones this fall
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Jun 232009
Flash Player 10 beta coming to most smartphones this fall, says CNet. This was promised last year, (see this YouTube video showing the Flash movie playing on an Android Phone, from last November) but now there’s a date.
In a Q2 audio press release, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen confirmed that Adobe will release a beta version of Flash Player 10 in October for a number of smartphone browsers, including Windows Mobile, Google Android, Palm WebOS, and Symbian. In addition, Narayen said ARM, Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel, Texas Instruments, and Qualcomm are currently optimizing the player for their products.
No iPhone, probably because they are betting on JavaScript instead?
7 Responses to “Flash for smartphones this fall”
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No iPhone, because Apple fears (probably rightly so) that they’d lose control of the app market. Let’s all be honest here: as much cool stuff as you can do in MobileSafari with JavaScript, it doesn’t match what you can do in a native iPhone app. Flash on the iPhone (presumably) would have similar capabilities to a native iPhone app.
Thus, with Flash 10 on the iPhone, developers wouldn’t have to wait on Apple (or funnel through Apple or give Apple a cut of the action) to make native-quality apps — and they wouldn’t have to do it exclusively for the iPhone either (again, making Apple less special). End result: Apple’s “smartphone” becomes like everyone elses’ web-enabled smartphone — essentially, they become “dumbphones” (like dumb terminals).
While I’m a big Flash Player fan, you could substitute Java in the above argument.
I 100% agree with Troy on that one.
Yep, I’d agree with Troy Gilbert too. Sounds like Apple want to control what people do with the iPhone and Flash just opens up too many opportunities. They must make a fortune on their apps so anything else would just be competition.
I also guess that maybe it has something to do with YouTube support. Currently you need to watch every YouTube video through the iPhone app – which I’d bet YouTube have a deal with Apple on – yet if the phones supported Flash then you could go to any movie site instead.
Apple is banking on HTML 5.0, which at minimum, will be an open standard they can rely on, whereas supporting Flash means opening their device to any vulnerabilities Adobe didn’t find.
If Adobe really cared, though, they could easily release a version of Flash player for jailbroken iPhones. Other developers who have done this have been able to later get their apps in the AppStore, once Apple’s restrictions on certain types of apps have become more lenient (e.g. Podcaster).
The real limitation for Adobe in this matter is Apple’s ToS that doesn’t allow sold apps to utilize plugins (i.e. an app shouldn’t have access to additional files/ROMs/etc). So really, Adobe would need to push a deal with Apple much like YouTube did, to make Flash integral to the iPhone core.
It’s not just about Apple getting a cut of the pie, however. If they wanted that, Adobe would probably give it to them. It’s more about Apple controlling the look/feel of apps for a consistent experience, which is exactly what the iPhone API and the app approval process is for.
The reality is that Adobe products are far from secure, are unnecessarily system-intensive in the wrong settings (i.e. Flash embedded in most web pages), and simply don’t offer much that HTML 5 or Objective C don’t.
It doesn’t make sense to say flash could somehow replace iPhone apps considering the huge amount of iPhone API that flash would never be able to access (all the sensors, the push server, maps integration, address book, music, etc). That’s like saying flash on the Wii somehow made WiiWare moot. While Apple’s motives are unclear I do think they were at least being honest about flash’s impact on battery/CPU. With the new 3GS out though that excuse becomes much weaker. I do think they are betting heavily on HTML 5 and that is probably at least partially responsible.
http://www.skyfire.com/ “Ajax, Javascript, Flash 10 – it just works.”
I’m not sure how, I understood adobe was precious with the source licenses for recent versions of flash. So I’d guess some evil hacks but I could be wrong.
There are no major technical problems, it’s all just politics and apple is apple, what do you expect?
Flash is still icky though.