Adobe Flash for every smartphone but the iPhone?

Jonny Evans
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October 05, 2009
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Adobe has revealed a series of alliances and new Flash software which threatens to bring support for its proprietary multimedia software to almost every mobile device - except Apple’s iPhone.

At the MAX conference in Los Angeles Adobe is is demonstrating Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones, a version of mobile Flash that delivers faster rendering, lower memory consumption and all for less battery drain. A beta is expected to be available for Windows Mobile, Palm webOS and desktop systems including Windows, Macintosh and Linux later this year.

Public betas for Google Android and Symbian OS are expected to be available in early 2010. In addition, Adobe and RIM announced a joint collaboration to bring Flash Player to Blackberry smartphones, and Google joined up for the Open Screen Project initiative.

Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and high definition (HD) videos across devices.

New mobile-ready features that take advantage of native device capabilities include support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation. Take a look at a demo on a Palm Pre here.

“We’ve been working with some great partners including Nvidia and ARM to optimize the player for those devices and create a quality mobile experience,” said Adobe Flash developer, Ryan Stewart.

David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are excited about the broad collaboration of close to 50 industry leaders in the Open Screen Project and the ongoing collaboration with 19 out of the top 20 handset manufacturers worldwide. It will be great to see first devices ship with full Flash Player in the first half of next year.”

Missing from the line-up - at least so far - is Apple. Take a look at what Harry McCracken has to say about that - is Flash support on phones a promise for a multimedia future, or just going to end up meaning those annoying Flash-based ads will also play on your phone, sucking your battery power? McCracken argues that iPhone users are steadily becoming less interested in Flash on the iPhone, as they have thousands of Apps to keep them entertained.

 

Comments (13)

dj_aris (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 3:15am

It's not only the iPhone issue. Flash implementation is pathetic even on SL. Hope the GPU acceleration will fix this.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 3:51am

Bah! It shouldn't require GPU accelleration to fix Flash. Some basic code optimization would go a long way to reduce memroy footprint and improve performance. Throwing a GPU at it just sucks down more power. Not good at all.

My speculation is that Adobe is secretly working a re-engineered and optimized build for Flash 11...

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 3:19am

Flash on OSX sucks big time, go h.264

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 3:33am

Did you know that Flash is (or was, until they embedded the ability for flash to work with screenreader), mostly useless for the blind or partially sighted? No wonder Apple aren't interested.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 7:58am

do you mean that apple users are all blind or partially sighted ?

Alex (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 4:08am

nice feature

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 5:14am

iPhone has a YouTube app, right?

It is only Safari on the iPhone that doesn't have Flash. Good choice with all the ads as well as embedded videos.

Ikir (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 5:27am

Nope, YouTube app plays mp4 videos, not the flash ones.

Baka Dubbs (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 6:54am

Flash needs to come to the ipod for 1 reason and 1 reason only. Hulu. If they only enabled the damn plug in on Hulu I would be perfectly happy.

Bruce Poon (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 7:24am

I believe there's a Hulu application on iPhone.

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 8:02am

Jobs isn't stupid - Having Flash on the iphone would put a major dent in App Store sales and could even affect future developer adoption...Regardless of how much resources Flash utilizes, it's in the best interest of Apple to keep Flash off the iphone for as long as possible.

crtaylor (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 10:18am

Adobe, like a lot of companies, has always been putting Mac on the back burner. First they leave out the 64-bit support on CS4, and now no Flash support for iPhone. When are they going to realize that Apple is not a joke? They need to be impartial to all Operating Systems! Either they're really flaky or Adobe needs to rethink its business model.

constant gina (not verified) | October 05, 2009 - 5:18pm

Missing from the line-up - at least so far - is Apple. Take a look at what Harry McCracken has to say about that - is Flash support on phones a promise for a multimedia future, or just going to end up meaning those annoying Flash-based ads will also play on your phone, sucking your battery power?