At Adobe’s recent “Flash On The Beach” event, a senior exec. finally confirmed that a team at Adobe was “currently developing a Flash player for the iPhone.”  Before you get to excited, it’s still up to Apple whether the player will actually make its way into a future firmware update, given the many reasons Apple might not want it in the first place.

One main reason a true Flash player might not make it into a firmware update for 1st and 2nd gen. iPhones is the fact that Flash is a relatively CPU-intensive application that might have to wait until the next hardware update of the device.  According to ZDNet, "the only problem is that Apple controls which apps get approved for distribution in the App Store and Flash, unfortunately, isn’t going to be one of them- at least for the foreseeable future.

Flash can even cause CPU overload on PC’s and even the most powerful smartphones, so for Apple to allow it on its beloved iPhone would be nothing short of a miracle.  Other device makers and even Microsoft’s upcoming IE Mobile 6 will support Flash, but those devices have considerably more power than the iPhone at this point in time.  InfoSync had an interesting comparison of device processing power compared to the iPhone which shows why Flash may be possible on other devices, and not the iPhone:

The only saving grace for Flash on the iPhone would be if other smartphones slowly begin to adopt the technology.  Apple would almost have to step to the plate if it starts being left behind.  Knowing Apple, and Steve Job’s previous statement that: “the current version of Flash isn’t good enough for the iPhone,” I would guess that Apple would force Adobe to create a specially-tuned version of the player, and likely one that wouldn’t offer full-out support.  Maybe Adobe’s version they’ve been developing is just that.  Either way, it’s way past due, and if people keep complaining, Apple almost has to comply sooner or later. 

Related:

Entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 8:17 pm under Opinion, Rumor, iPhone.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Justin Montgomery.
Stumble It!