Adobe is working with Apple to develop a version of Flash specifically for the iPhone, according to a report Monday. Adobe’s CEO said tailoring Flash for the touch-screen handset required Apple’s involvement.
“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told Bloomberg while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Although 80 percent of handsets use Flash, in 2008 Apple CEO Steve Jobs dismissed the standard and light versions of Flash and said Adobe needed another version for the iPhone.
After initially responding a Flash version could be created using Apple’s existing development tools, Adobe backtracked, noting difficulties that “prevent third-party code from running in the devices’ built-in programs,” a report noted.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
