MacBlogz - One Stop Apple News - Bridging the Apple Community and Keeping Tabs on the Rumor Mill.

Is Flash on the iPhone a dead end?

While Adobe’s Flash animation/video player is still not supported by the iPhone, rendering many sites unreadable, it has been a feature that people have expressed great interest in. Yet up until now, Steve Jobs has been critical of supporting a mobile version of Flash, suggesting that it wouldn’t be powerful enough for the iPhone.

However, during Adobe’s Q2 earnings call, chief exec Shantanu Narayen noted that, “We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.”

While this sounds rather promising, the problem may not lie in perfecting a version of mobile Flash, but rather convincing Apple to allow it on the iPhone. “The easiest solution, which Adobe could do on its own, is to make a standalone Flash player, which people could use to watch Flash video files or animations by themselves. To get that into the market, Adobe would just need to submit it for inclusion into the iPhone apps store.” via Silicon Alley Insider.

Unfortunately this would not be anything like the way that Flash works on a computer, where it for the most part, will seamlessly display animation, video, ads..etc, as it has been integrated into web browsers.

“Adobe could independently achieve that on the iPhone, in theory, by commissioning/building its own Web browser with built-in Flash software — even one using the same Webkit guts as Safari. But assuming this is possible, it would also be very cumbersome. And there’s no guarantee that Apple would allow a Safari competitor into the apps store.”

Striking a deal with Apple to include Flash as a plugin for Safari may be the best option. Yet this would require a far different business interaction than Apple has with App Store developers. So will we ever see Flash supported on the iPhone? I would hope so as there are many sites that I would like to have access to that are reliant on Flash, namely, Hulu, where I could watch streaming movies and TV shows.