The Apple blogosphere is rife with renewed chatter sparked by Adobe’s Senior Director of Engineering, Paul Betlem at the recent Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton: “My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform. If Apple says yes, Adobe will have the player available in a very short time.”
So, let’s see, getting Adobe’s closed platform to play on Apple’s closed system, that sounds like a fun game, right? Building a plug-in for a browser that doesn’t support plug-ins, what more productive endeavor could a team desire?
Of course, the Internet itself is riddled with Flash and Apple has positioned the iPhone as the must have mobile device for browsing the Internet, so there is that conflict to resolve somehow, plus, allowing people access to the gazillion online Flash games could hurt game sales in the AppStore, but Apple doesn’t see the AppStore as a significant profit center anyway (coughs), and oh yes, there’s the battery issue to resolve since Flash is such a processor hog.
Of the pieces I’ve read, I think Aviv at MacBlogz gets it mostly right, saying if Flash does come to the iPhone, Safari better get a “Flash-Off” setting.
I kinda like not seeing Flash ads on my iPhone, personally.
14 responses to “Adobe is Game, But Does iPhone Need Flash?”
i concur. we don’t need flash anymore. all its use for is ads anyways.
i don’t miss it, and i don’t want it.
and i am…errr was a flash developer.
There’s an app for Pandora, so why the hell would you need flash?
I think this is a double edged sword. While pessimists like yourselves only see flash as an advertising medium, I (optimist) see it as a major online video medium. In fact, I just used Hulu.com and thought how nice it would be to watch that video on my iPhone. Now if other video sources could figure out how YouTube manages to feed their videos to the iPhone without Flash, we could probably do without Adobe’s Flash Player. That’s my 2 cents.
Try getting a customized Stock History on yahoo finance or check a mutual funds historical performance on trowe.price or look at your family tree on geni.com, without flash and you’ll see why it needs to be supported on the iPhone.
Like Firefox, there should be an option to not play flash media until the user hits it.
Like it or not, not having flash is a serious hole in the iPhone web experience.
Not use flash? Really?
Flash is one of the major complaints with the iPhone as a platform for entertainment. Flash ads may be annoying, but being at a dead loss to enjoy the wealth of flash content on the Web is far far more annoying. The ability to watch streaming video from ANY SITE ON THE WEB other than YouTube would be nice, the ability to play Flash games freely, the ability to browse sites that use Flash navigation menus and tools….
I really can’t believe we’re even having this discussion, but I’ll grant that maybe I’m just missing it more than some people are. I mean, the iPhone and iPod Touch can be the same as a desktop or a laptop – if Flash is useless at best and annoying at worst, simply don’t install it – but I guarantee you that the moment Flash is available for the iPhone, it’ll be the number one download in the App store.
Flash is horrible. I don’t know of any other plug-in that sucks up processor cycles like flash and the ad-industry have used it to produce more and more intrusive ads.
I don’t own an iPhone, but if Flash comes to it, I’d welcome a ‘Flash off’ switch. In fact, I’d welcome the same on Safari as it’s my most hated plug-in.
I’ll never understand that silly mentality of complaining about something that is a CHOICE. If you don’t like Flash on your iPhone, then don’t install it, you boobs.
For the overwhelming majority of us who DO want sites to start coming up without broken plugin icons all over the place, we’ll choose to install it and love it no matter how much that bothers your nerdgos.
I’ll get ahold of some ad-blocking software like I have now for Safari and Firefox if the Flash ads weigh down the iPhone too much or disable and enable Flash at will through udder methods.
Whether you like it or not, it’s a Flash web world for now and into the future. I personally will be glad to see Flash go and involve into animations, etc. that aren’t proprietary plug-ins… but, that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore the reality that there are plenty of great sites todays that utilize Flash. Get over yourselves and just don’t install the plug-in if you hate it so much.