iPhone with Flash

Good news for Flash developers around the world. Finally Adobe is pushing forward to get Flash support on all mobile devices. They have now confirmed that the Adobe Flash Player 10.1 will be available for Windows Mobile and Palm webOS by the end of the year and early 2010 betas will be available for Google Android and Symbian OS. There is also a plan to bring Flash to the Blackberry, but there is still no time frame for this beta announced just yet. So what about iPhone? Well, unfortunately there is no immediate solution to run Flash on the iPhone.

The Flash player 10 for mobile will get accelerometer and multi-touch support early next year says Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch. GPS and other device capabilities should also be supported, and with this Adobe at least shows that they don’t want to miss out on the mobile device market. Adobe also announces that the Flash player has greatly improved its performance and reduced its memory usage, which really is needed to run a Flash solution on a mobile. Let’s cross our fingers and hope this is true.

Though Adobe will still not be able to deliver Flash in the iPhone Safari browser, they have announced a truly exciting feature in the upcoming Flash authoring tool Flash CS5. Create native iPhone apps using Flash! Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod using ActionScript 3. The Flash Professional CS5 beta is planned to be released later this year. Will Flash be a competitive platform for developing iPhone apps? Time will show.

There are already some example Apps made in Flash out there. We have tried some of them and none of them does any attempt to impress with high performance and interactivity. I must say I worry about the performance and memory usage, but I would happily be proven wrong and be able to produce Flash applications on all mobile devices.

As a dedicated Flash developer I do wish Adobe does this the right way and will be a major part of the future mobile development.