When the iPhone was first released, there was an abundance of speculation over whether the phone’s lack of Flash support would cripple its browser and give us something less than “the real web” that Apple had promised. At the time, Steve Jobs explained that the full version of Flash wouldn’t run well on the iPhone (the iPhone runs on an ARM11 chip, which doesn’t play nice with Flash), but that Adobe’s Mobile Flash was lacking in functionality - he wanted a product in the middle before Apple would consider putting Flash on the iPhone.
Today at the Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference, Adobe has confirmed that such an application is in development (it had previously been speculated to exist, but there was no official word from either company Adobe previously annouced it had a version working on an emulator). Adobe Sr. Director of Engineering Paul Betlem made the announcement, stating “My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.”
Betlem’s insistence that the iPhone is a closed platform is meant to infer that Adobe isn’t ultimately in control of whether or not Flash will ever make an apperance. This may be strictly true, but it’s unlikely that Adobe would begin work on the iPhone plugin in the first place if it didn’t have a reasonable expectation that Apple would include it, once it met Jobs’ expectations.
So it sounds like Flash is on the way. But do we really want it?
These days, most of us use Flash primarily to view videos on sites like Hulu, YouTube, and CNN. Flash on the iPhone may give us access to all of these sites (assuming its CPU can handle video), but I’d rather see native applications for each of these media hubs similar to what YouTube has created. Flash is notoriously CPU-intensive, which is the last thing the iPhone needs with its already lackluster battery life - native apps would allow for H.264 video playback on the phone’s Quicktime player that would probably require only a fraction of the CPU cycles.
Other issues with Flash crop up on more standard websites. Flash-based sites can be fun and innovative, but they also tend to be inefficient and unnecessarily difficult to navigate (see the Chipotle homepage for a good example). Finally, there’s the concern over Flash-based advertisements, which can be incredibly intrusive.
These issues aside, Flash still plays an integral role on the web, and there’s nothing more frustrating than getting denied trying to watch a Flash-only video clip. Apple should include Flash if only for completeness’ sake, while trying to give web developers an incentive to use it sparingly on their mobile sites.
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Perhaps they plan on including the Flash runtime and then wrap Flash games in some kind of iPhone application wrapper - that way, you’d still have to get the games through the app store but you could still write them in Actionscript3 and/or use Flex or whatever.
I doubt it though. Time to learn Objective C!
“it had previously been speculated to exist, but there was no official word from either company”
False. Adobe’s CEO said it existed in June:
http://www.alleyinsider.com/20.....-some-form
I don’t think this is about building apps in flash, it will be about getting video delivered to the iPhone. 99% of video on the internet is now flv, and without flash support, the iPhone is a little crippled. Note the android demos prominently feature video playback…
It sure would be. Since Flex, Flash is not all about adds and videos anymore you know, it’s also about pretty cool web-apps that run anywhere, independent of your browser - which is nice for webdevs… With Flash on the iPhone Flex Devs can also target the iPhone.
There won’t be anything better than native apps for iPhone. Flex apps often feel clumsy and slow even on the desktop platforms. Having a slow, unoptimized and battery draining Flex app running on the iPhone is probably the last thing you will ever want to do. Objective-C projects proved to be easy-to-port; and those developers following iPhone GUI development guidelines proved to be quite successful at delivering high-usability application. Just take a look at Enigmo, Chopper, iBlogger, Facebook.
Flex on iPhone is destined to fail, unless developers use Flex to develop iPhone applications with optimized GUI according to iPhone GUI standards. But still, it’s gonna feel like running a GTK app under KDE or Windows app inside of Mac OS.
Finally! A whole new market of iphone apps will appear I suspect, largely driven by Flex.
It’s worth thinking about how apps are distributed now vs what could be with Flash support. Apple would lose control potentially, which in my opinion isn’t a bad thing.
Sorry this is not related to the topic, but is Gmail (company one) down?
never mind it works now.
keeping flash off was a good thing. flash sucks balls. it forced developers to learn objective c.
It sure is a good thing. There’s a lot of websites out there using Flash, and almost every start-up is also using Flash for something. I don’t think about the App Store at all, Flash was needed at least on the browser.
You’re an idiot if you think bringing flash to the iphone is a bad thing.
Or Apple could make the Quicktime player be capable of playing Flash FLV files, it shouldn’t be a problem seeing as the file format spec is open now.
Perfect! That’s the way to go! I am a flex/flash dev myself and flex/flash can be using a lot of memory if not used properly .. And most people dont use em properly too
Completeness is the most important issue, flash is way too common to be ignored, and not only for video players. Many sites include small flash elements, sometimes crucial for basic service. If you do not enable flash you simply distort the web.
There was good reason to exclude it originally, because of performance concerns. But if Adobe is trying its damndest to make a version that works on the iPhone, it’s definitely a good thing. I do go to a lot of video sites so I can’t do that on the iPhone, but there’s allso plenty of legitimate uses for Flash on many web sites. I’m not talking about sites that are “pure” flash (I hate those sites, grr), but they can add a lot of value to some sites. I welcome Flash with open arms to the iPhone.
apple will never allow it. flash support means less money for apple which is a no-no in their locked down world. flash would drain battery life on the already pathetic iphone/touch battery. flash based games would start appearing everywhere which my friends would eat into apples profits. to hell with the app store.
Well - now that we know that the Adobe guys are still alive and obviously at work. Why don’t they release a flash version, that wont speed up my Macbook Pro fans to 7000rpm, while displaying a silly animation? Just curious…
Hmmm poorly done Flash apps makes your computer act up? I wonder if poorly done Object-C apps will make it act up as well? Just curious…
“…native apps would allow for H.264 video playback on the phone’s Quicktime player that would probably require only a fraction of the CPU cycles.”
Actually, Flash Player 9 included an update last year that included support for the H.264 codex. So Flash Player 9 can now play MP4, MOV, M4V, M4A and 3PG video files as long as they use the H.264 codex.
Yes, but the biggest problems is that most of the video sharing web sites do not store H.264 encoded copies of the videos. It would be best for us, consumers, if Apple were to include the support of the FLV codec in the iPhone platform.
As outraged as I was… I got over it when the Pandora app was completed.
It’s been an open secret for as long as I can recall that Adobe has been trying to get their runtime on the iPhone. As an interactive designer, there’s a huge value in Flash. It has a great API and is truly write-once-run-everywhere. I get to spend my time being creative instead of debugging cross-platform bullshit.
Apple has a notoriously tight grip on the iPhone, but I would really like to see both an AIR runtime and Flash plugin made available for the phone. I’ll probably choose between the iPhone and Android based on who supports it better (or at all).
this is a good thing, more functionality, and apple should configure quicktime to play flv files.
http://gatesandjobs.blogspot.com/
do you reply to every post?
Yes, it is a good thing. I’m sure Adobe is working completely within the restraints that Apple is forcing upon them so I wouldn’t be worried about it killing the batteries and things like that. If it caused that huge of a problem it just wouldn’t end up on the iphone. So no worries.
Exciting news.. we want to put this on a iPhone :
http://www.uvlayer.com
(do a search and drag/drop/click the thumbnails)
A hulu iphone app would be absolutely amazing.
check out http://www.unity3d.com which works on iPhone already
Seems to me like this app above all others will put a lot of pressure on Apple.
We would sure like to have Flash for Tynt (www.tynt.com) which doesn’t currently run on the iPHone due to lack of Flash support. We are having to code around the Flash we would normally use in order to support basic functionality on the iPhone. Native flash would let us keep one code stream.
Are you crazy? This is an excellent idea that is long overdue. Having Flash would allow for a true internet experience being able to access videos off any site including News site not just Entertainment related. You can advertise a true internet experience and not have the number one plugin that people use with their browsers. I got over copy and paste and a bunch of other stuff that I can basically live without, but when I go to a website and they have a video I want to watch but can’t access it it makes me shut down my device and boot my computer up. Bring on the Flash and delete this blog entry.
I am not a fan of flash at all. The focus needs to be on easy to read web pages and not a bunch of fluff.
“… but they also tend to be inefficient and unnecessarily difficult to navigate” - are you serious? This is a design issue and has absolutely nothing to do with Flash!
The fact the Apple deem Flash incompatible with the iPhone (to whatever degree and for whatever reason) is a joke. Now that Android phones are just a blink away I think this will put pressure on Apple to accept the Flash player. My thinking is the only reason they don’t want Flash on the iPhone is because it is entirely possible to develop very sophisticated web-aware application with Flash that would compete directly with many of the apps in the AppStore. No?
Yeah, it’s a design issue, but it’s also pretty common among Flash developers.
This is absolutely right on: The claims that Flash would burden the iPhone’s battery, or that it’s incompatible with a chip seem like prevarication to me. Full disclosure: flash developer talking.
Adding a flash codec to Quicktime is a great idea,
but I’d also be interested in visiting sites like ustream, or stickam.
Would that method support them?
It will be great once Flash is on the iPhone. Don’t like it? Don’t use it. Turn it off in the browser, or don’t download Flash-based apps.
Apple would look more than a little lame when Flash starts running on Android someday, and iPhone gets behind in terms of giving customers the best and most complete Web experience possible. They will have to go with the flow. It is a de facto standard, at least for the foreseeable future.
And Flash will not be a real threat to native iPhone apps anyway, especially as iPhone development matures and quality keeps increasing.
I really hope there’s a way to disable it. Flash ads will render the iPhone useless due to cpu killing the battery. Those flash animations can only be optimized so much. They can’t be offloaded to an h264 decoder since they are vector based, not h264 video.
Just makes those “punch the monkey win a prize” ads that much more painful to users.
Android anyone?
Hoping that Flash NEVER makes it to the iPhone. I’m tired of Flashturbation sites, and designers that think just because “you can” that “you should.” The Flash runtime is heavy, processor intensive, and adds unnecessary BLOAT.
I prefer lightweight, efficient, compact web sites that are Flash-free, and I’ll never install Flash on my iPhone.
>native applications for each of these media hubs similar to what YouTube has created.
Wow what a terrible idea! Please take your cluelessness back to Web 1.0 where you had to create specific sites for a certain browser. How godforsaken to divvy content up once again to be site/device/browser specific. bleh. Was mike out of the office today or something? How did this report from stonehenge get published?
What a poorly written post. How long did it take you to put this gem together? About 10 minutes?
Your vagueness on the whole topic is laughable.
As is the vagueness of your criticism.
Good news.
“…unnecessarily difficult to navigate (see the Chipotle homepage for a good example).”
Not to over quote what has already been stated, but you really think Chipotle is hard to navigate? I’m pretty sure there are better examples, but regardless it’s completely a designer issue and not a technology issue.
On top of that there are thousands of well designed flash sites, and thousands of well designed flash widgets. I doubt this will be an issue or drawback.
It’s not hard, but it’s annoying. You have to mouseover the logo whenever you want to see a menu (try that with multitouch), and stuff flies around for no good reason.
And yes, it’s a design issue. But it’s one that has become pretty synonymous with Flash.
I believe that Apple might add a new distribution pipe for iPhone apps that are based on Flash/Flex that you can download from the AppStore as well. It stays closed, but that way Apple gets lot more developers on board as Flash/Flex is an already settled technology.
Then we might get a new option in Flex Builder to build Flex-Apps for the iPhone. I would appreciate that!!!
And I don’t believe that the Flash-Plugin will be open for users to surf around on the internet and watch flashy websites.
When I was at Apple we tested Flash on the iPhone and it sucked in performance. Assuming Adobe are able to fork the codebase and produce an iPhone specific version, it still won’t see the light of day.
Two reasons. Having a technical dependency on a 3rd party competiting technology just doesn’t makes financial sense (especially given the market at the moment and Apple products being Luxury consumer items).
Lastly, Adobe Flash has had more security breaks than any software I’ve ever encountered so much so that both Apple and Microsoft roll out patches to the operating system to cushion their stupidity.
No other software in history has had an operating system resolve their faults for them, simply due to inability to act quick enough.
Combine these two reasons and put it on the iPhone?
Adobe can dream, but it’s not going to happen.
Dammit, people who complain about flash don’t really see the real use of it and aren’t even well informed enough. When I was on windows mobile I could easily write any kind of application I wanted using flash. I didn’t have to deal with J2ME or having to learn the windows mobile SDK. So any application I wrote for the web could easily port to my phone.
When I switched to Blackberry I lost all of that, because Adobe doesn’t make a version of Flash for Blackberries. So I can’t run any of the applications I’ve written, and it just hasn’t been worth it to make stuff for the Blackberry, since it requires proprietary stuff from them.
The fact that both Apple and Adobe are balking at the idea of Flash for the iPhone is one of the reasons why I’ll be getting a G1 instead, it just seems like it will happen quicker under Android. Apple doesn’t want Flash because it could possibly bypass their App Store, and it would get around the requirement of buying a mac if you want to develop for the iPhone.
Both flash (swf) & flash video (flv) run fine on the Archos media players (they use a mini-opera interface & I think run flash 9. They have no problem watching online videos at youtube & even open the videos full screen automatically.
I’ve been looking at this on an Archos 605 wifi. Will play offline or online & doesn’t matter what type of flash - games or apps (btw - I can’t find many non-game based flash apps online, searching “flash apps” brings up a load of flash tools, not flash non-game based content that can be used offline) or experimentation (a few yugop experis run pretty well on it).
Certain flash things are sluggish, but others are nice & fluid. FLV is great.
So if iPhone could handle flash it could be a real plus for iphone users.
Me I’m sticking with my archos - I don’t wan’t to phone anyone anyhow !
Flash is not limited to only Videos. As the article states: its possible to do highly innovative work with Flash. At http://www.ChessCube.com, we use Flash and Flex to create a highly usable interface.
In fact Adobe has made great improvements with Flex and AIR. The release of Flash 10 is going to allow for highly optimized systems.
So in my view the ability to build games for the iPhone in Flash would greatly extend our service offering.
please, get it straight. adobe hasn’t even finished the app, and even after it is completed, it has to be approved.
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/30/adob …
buried as inaccurate.
I’m glad Objective-C exists. It provides a place for the remedial programmers so that they stay out of the Flex community. Just keep doing everything that Apple wants you to do, from the hardware to the software to the data service provider. Stepping outside of the Apple circle and accepting somebody else’s technologies is an act of betrayal. And the first person who calls me a troll for having a differing opinion gets 5 ApplePoints.