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.
Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie’s photos on Flickr.
