Adobe To Develop iPhone Flash/Media Player After All
So the hide-and-seek game of egos ends, at least nominally: Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) CEO Shantanu Narayen said at a conference call with investors that his company is finally working on a media player for Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) iPhone, which means Flash will come to it. Apple released its software developer tools last month, and Adobe’s been working on it since. The tools will let Adobe build a Flash player for the iPhone, then distribute it through Apple’s iTunes online store, he said, reports WSJ. Question remains how long would it take…this sounds like a non-answer answer from Adobe, and not sure what if anything would it take from Apple side to enable or disable Flash.
This comes after months of the waiting from the industry for the online video standard to come onto the iPhone. As late as early March this year, Steve Jobs said that Flash just wasn’t good enough for the iPhone..he said the current Flash player performs better on larger devices such as laptops, and thus, performs too slowly on the iPhone.
Since the iPhone’s launch last summer, the device hasn’t supported Flash, meaning that iPhone users haven’t been able to view a vast bulk of internet videos on their handsets, as most online videos are formatted for Flash. YouTube is the only online video provider to go out of their way to format their videos especially for the iPhone. Also, it’s not a secret that Adobe and Apple haven’t always been on the best of terms.
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Comments (1)
Mar 19, 2008 1:22 AM
release it tomorrow, please
Mar 19, 2008 7:24 AM
This is exactly like Sun’s announcement with Java - Adobe have announced they will port the platform, but Apple have no requirement to allow it to reach consumers and actually this kind of runtime environment is explicitly against their terms and conditions for the iPhone SDK.
What is funnier about this one is that a lot of the kind of people who form the Apple diehard fans are also the kind of people who are flash designers - will this make them begin to question St Steve? Who knows…
Mar 19, 2008 8:34 AM
This would be good news for flash developers. It’s not the number of handsets, obviously. But Apple’s customers are used to paying premium prices for Apple add ons, (regardless of value). I could see iPhone users paying 2 to 5 times the usual cost for a quality flash application. The major challenge for Adobe will be capturing input from the touch screen and accelerometer using the robust flash lite 3 APIs.