For Adobe Systems, mobile phone is a critical field the company needs to cover in pursuing its user interaction platform strategy. Being able to support iPhone (given the phone's dominantly popularity) is therefore important at this moment. However, Apple is of course not so hasty about helping Adobe to make this happens.
Greed clashed, Adobe in its Adobe Systems' MAX developer's conference early October 2009, has demonstrated its tough position toward Apple. The keynote addresses included Adobe's plans to bring the Flash Player to most of the major smartphone platforms, i.e. RIM, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Google's Android, and Palm's webOS. Apple's iPhone was absent from the list. In other words, Adobe left the matter of supporting Flash on iPhone Safari browser to Apple.
According to Rich Tretola of Everything Flex blog Adobe had to create a way to allow for applications built on the Flash Player to act as native iPhone applications. This was only possible by actually embedding the Flash Player within the application and then submitting the whole thing for approval to Apple just as any other application that goes to Apple for approval.
And here is another interesting fact worthy to note. Adobe recently changed the message iPhone users receive when they go to Adobe's web page to install Flash. The text now states: “Flash Player not available for your device. Apple restricts use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch.”
The bottom line is, if one wants to develop Flash for mobile phones, application may well be one's only choice when it comes to iPhone. Web pages with Flash contents will continue to look ugly on iPhone for quite some time.
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