Adobe's iPhone Hail Mary

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the move to port Flash to the iPhone isn't a last-ditch effort on Adobe's part to remain relevant in the quickly evolving smartphone market. By allowing developers to compile existing Flash apps into native binaries, Adobe believes it has found a way around Apple's requirements that no non-Apple API interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an app, a clause that has also prevented Sun from porting JVM to the iPhone. The resulting apps will be completely stand-alone, with no runtimes and no Flash Player required — if Apple lets Adobe get away with it, no small feat given how protective Apple has been about its app market. But as much as Apple has at stake here, Adobe may actually have more, McAllister writes. 'Already the idea of using Web languages and tools to build smartphone applications is taking hold. Palm has built an entire smartphone platform around the idea. Apple supports the use of Web technologies like AJAX to build applications based on the iPhone's Safari browser. And developers will soon even be able to build Web-based applications for BlackBerry handsets, thanks to a new SDK from Research in Motion. As late to the game as it is, what Adobe needs now is to convince developers that Flash is better than the other options — and that could be a tough sell.'"

Comments

That's a silly conclusion

[nahdude812]

It's not a "last ditch effort" to remain relevant. It's just Adobe continuing the tradition of ubiquity of their platform. Apple won't let them put a runtime on the phone, so they'll deploy native code instead.

Apple supports the use of Web technologies like AJAX to build applications based on the iPhone's Safari browser.

Sorry, but there's a big difference between an AJAX app and a native app. Try writing a browser based graphical game on the iPhone; it's going to fall on its face pretty quickly.

for BlackBerry handsets, thanks to a new SDK from Research in Motion.

Hmm, convince developers to learn a whole new SDK for a single platform, when they can stick with a mature language and toolset they already know, deploy it in the browser, on the desktop (via Air), and on basically every phone on the planet that can run custom apps, including the BlackBerry?

Sorry, this whole article is bunk. Adobe isn't struggling with relevance, they're just making sure it doesn't start to slip, as Apple is so strongly trying to make it. In fact, this probably backfired on Apple a bit - Flash apps running as a native binary will probably have access to device functions which the normal Flash runtime wouldn't have.

Adobe needs now is to convince developers that Flash is better than the other options — and that could be a tough sell

I'm guessing this sale has already been made. A lot of developers like working in Flash. Actionscript is a surprisingly elegant language. Based on the number of Flash apps which already turn up all over the web, a whole new segment of developers are seeing this as access to a development platform which was previously closed to them.

It's about the tools

[TheRaven64]

The flash player is a nice Smalltalk VM with a PostScript-like vector drawing model. It's a (very nice) incremental evolution of the Smalltalk 80 system. The Flash authoring app, however, is one of the best rapid application development tools on the market today. You can do everything that Flash can do with JavaScript, the canvas tag, and SVG, but there aren't (yet) any development tools that are anywhere near as nice as Flash for this environment.

Adobe doesn't make much money from the Flash player; they give away the desktop one and sell the mobile one to OEMs quite cheaply. In contrast, they charge $700 for a license for the developer tools. A lot of money, but not much in comparison to the cost of the person using them.

In the long term, the flash player will probably go away. They've already made some first steps towards this, donating the ActionScript VM to the Mozilla project, and producing things like AIR which let you run Flash apps as stand-alone binaries. I wouldn't be surprised if future versions of the Adobe Flash can target HTML5 as well as the Flash plugin, and eventually just HTML6 or a native environment.