Ray Valdes

At the Adobe Max conference in LA today, Adobe announced a side-door way to get Flash applications onto the iPhone platform. This Flash-on-iPhone question has been a vexing issue for years, ever since the iPhone was first introduced, because both Apple and Adobe have strong loyal user communities with a high degree of overlap. At every gathering I have attended over the past two years, whether for iPhone developers or Flash designers, the question comes up: When will Flash run on the iPhone?

The faultline in the common ground shared by these two vendor’s ecosystems has remained a visible and ugly gap in the market landscape. I’m only an outside observer, but it appears that there is a backstory not without intrigue, twists and turns. A year ago, Adobe said that it had Flash running on the iPhone in the lab, and developers should ask Apple for the official details of when and why. Apple’s response was typically unspecific, but contained allusions to performance, battery life and memory issues.

Although I am not privy to details, it appears that the Flash-on-iPhone question goes beyond narrow-scope technical issues of the Flash VM and the iPhone operating environment, and goes back to broader interactions between these companies dating back to the 1990s. It spills over to issues of personalities and conflicting business agendas. For example, I gather some of this bad blood dates back to the days of the Next Machine (remember that bygone era?). If stories are to be believed, Adobe put a lot of pressure on Next to use Adobe’s implementation of Postscript for the on-screen rendering. Instead, Steve Jobs and his team pushed back hard with their own implementation of Display Postscript, which they felt was faster and better integrated into the environment. Today, Mac users rely on the Apple “Preview” application on OS/X to view PDF files, and I can say that it is certainly a lot faster and easier than the experience of firing up Adobe Acrobat on Windows. (However, I won’t venture into a guessing game on which element in the mix is to blame for latency: the hardware, operating system, or PDF reader software.)

In the past, I have observed senior managers at these two companies talk about the other company with dark frowns and firmly clenched teeth. After various shuffles in management team at both companies, there was hope that bygones would be bygones (also that perhaps people at Apple would remember that Flash originated at Macromedia, not at Adobe, and therefore should not be tarred with the same brush as the PDF engine). But nothing, until today.

Adobe’s announcement of Flash-on-iPhone is a pleasant surprise to those of us who had resigned themselves, like children of divorced parents, never to have a unified holiday gathering again. However, what Adobe has done is not get a full, welcomed, seat at the dining room table, but has instead snuck in through the side door, lurking in the kitchen with the catering staff. By that I mean that Flash is a second-class participant in the iPhone platform. SWF files that contain dynamic ActionScript cannot be loaded on the iPhone on-demand or embedded in Web pages. Instead, Flash programs must be pre-compiled by developers and packaged into binaries (boo!), which can then be distributed and monetized through the AppStore (Yay!). By the way, if you are interested in seeing some source code that works with iPhone, check out http://bit.ly/flash2iphone

In conjunction with this save-as-iPhone-app feature in the beta version of the upcoming Flash Pro CS5 tool, Adobe also announced Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones, which, when released in first half of 2010, will have improvements in memory consumption, battery use, hardware acceleration support, and input modes.

Adobe’s hope seems to be that as more Flash-related content surfaces on the iPhone platform, to the delight (presumably) of users, then Apple will relent and let the banished partner in from the kitchen to the dining room table. So this is only a first step. However, there is a genuine risk of adverse consequences. Just like an ex-spouse sneaking into the kitchen may not be viewed favorably by the host of the gathering, even if no rules are broken (which none are in this case, because Adobe complies with Apple’s rules of the house, and there are already a few Flash-origin apps in the AppStore today), it is possible that Apple will respond negatively to this move by Adobe. In an extreme hypothetical scenario, developers could find their apps yanked from the AppStore by a punitive Apple. Thus far, Apple has provided no reassurance.

Beyond any sudden sanctions from Apple, Flash developers risk disappointment in other ways: the Flash-on-iPhone approach has certain constraints that will prevent some apps from running unmodified (for example, no embedded HTML content, no dynamic SWFs, no dynamically loaded SWFs, no RTMPE, no PixelBender filters, no microphone or video camera access). Also, an existing Flash app might be assume certain operating environment and performance characteristics (for example, low latency network access or copious amounts of RAM) that are degraded on the iPhone platform. Lastly, a Flash application may have a look and feel that, despite being carefully crafted, might in some cases violate the voluminous Apple interface design guidelines, and would need some rework in order to be approved for AppStore distribution.

So this announcement is far from a game changer, but it does mean a step forward for developers — as long as those hatchets from past grudge matches don’t resurface.

This melodrama might make for interesting reading, but it should not detract from the impressive announcements Adobe made today, about a plethora of mobile devices, tools, and services — FlashPlayer 10.1, OpenScreen, Omniture Developer Sandbox, Cold Fusion 9, and so on.

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