Adobe Stops Development For iPhone

adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe's principal product manager Mike Chambers announced that Adobe is no longer investing in iPhone-based Flash development. The move comes after Apple put out a new draft of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. According to Chambers, Adobe will still provide the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5, but the company is not currently planning any additional investments in that feature." Daring Fireball points out approvingly Apple's rebuttal to the claim that Flash is an open format, however convenient it might be for iPad owners. Related: The new app policy seems to be inconsistently enforced. Reader wilsonthecat writes "Novell have released a new press release in response to Apple's announcement that none-C/C++/Objective-C based iPhone application development breaks their SDK terms. The press release names several apps that have made it past app review process since the new Apple SDK agreement."

Comments

Hilarity

[Jaysyn]

It would be very funny if Adobe, just for spite, decided to stop making it's high end graphic design products compatible with Apple hardware. And figured out a way to make them not work via virtualization on Apple hardware as well.

I know, I know, they are publicly traded & would never cut off that revenue stream.

Re:Adobe also said...

[beakerMeep]

Yeah, pro-Flash and anti-Apple people talk as though Flash is a stable and established standard component of any mobile platform, and has been for years.

This, ladies and gents, is the perfect example of a straw man.

While the rest of what you say is actually very spot on, I think you are forgetting that the implication here is that no one can package technology for anyone else to run on an iPhone. I could never create a library or SDK or what-have-you for you to include in your iphone binary if it has any hinf of interacting with another language at any statge.

Apple's controlling nature and hatred for Flash is causing significant collateral damage and sets a terrible precedent with regards to respect for developers.

Re:Adobe also said...

[iluvcapra]

Why should I, as a developer, not get a tool to help me render animations?

Why should Apple, as a hardware vendor, permit you to commoditize its profitable hardware in order for you to create software that will help sell other hardware vendor's handsets?

You seem to think all these different vendors give you these tools because they like you or something. Apple gives you tools so you can make apps that make people wanna buy iDevices. Anything you can do that doesn't necessarily drive hardware sales, they're going to fight very hard against. Adobe tries to make its Flash player as cheap and available as possible to drive demand for its authoring products. Anything that makes it possible to author rich web content outside of the Adobe ecosystem they're going to fight very hard against. Thus the two companies find themselves at crossed purposes here.

Apple doesn't want people to write apps that run on multiple OSs, because it will drive commoditization of the handset hardware. Adobe doesn't want people to be able to create rich web animations with anything but its products, because it will drive commoditization of the authoring software. It's really just that simple.