It’s no secret that Apple doesn’t like Flash. It won’t allow Flash apps to run on the iPhone or iPod Touch despite all of Adobe’s cajoling and pleading, and despite the fact that it’s long been working in the labs. The iPhone’s lack of support for Flash is a major inconvenience for both consumers and developers, and is a gaping hole in the iPhone’s arsenal.
But all of that is about to change because Adobe is going to bring its 2 million Flash developers to the iPhone, with or without Apple’s blessing. As it announced in October, the next version of its Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 (currently in private beta), will include a “Packager for iPhone” apps which will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. (Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Silverlight). This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate.
Much of the focus in the Flash iPhone debate centers around the fact that Flash is the de facto video standard on the Web. For instance, whenever you encounter a Web page in your iPhone browser with a Flash video, instead of seeing it right there in the browser, the phone must open up a separate Quicktime player. Most video on the Web, including everything on YouTube, is displayed through a Flash player, so this gets to be tedious. Apple has always cited technical reasons for why it doesn’t support Flash. It’s a battery hog, it’s too slow for mobile phones, not capable enough, etc. Some of these issues are valid and Adobe has been addressing them to the point that Flash now works fine on Android.
But there is a more strategic reason Apple kept Flash off the iPhone. It wanted a chance to become ingrained with developers. In addition to video, Flash, of course, can be used to create Web apps—the kind of apps that might look good on a phone. Apple had to hold off Flash not so to control the video experience on the iPhone, but because it needed to establish its own Apple-controlled iPhone SDK. The last thing it needed was a competing developer platform getting in the way.
Once Adobe publicly releases CS5, Flash apps and video still won’t run on the iPhone. But those 2 million developers will be able to keep working with Adobe tools and simply turn them into iPhone apps automatically. In contrast, there are only an estimated 125,000 or so iPhone developers. This will lower the barriers to making iPhone apps even more than they are today, which may or may not be a good thing. But if you thought there were a lot of iPhone apps now, just wait until the Flash floodgates are open.
Wrong. If there is a will, there is a way. Apple will find a rationale for banning Adobe-generated apps.
As painful as it is to say, you’re right. Apple will stop them, even if it means taking a blow to their business.
Flash will export iPhone apps. Well? We’ll see. How will the logic work? Complex interactions? What are the limitations?
Lot’s of assumptions here with little solid grounding. In terms of data driven apps the actual iPhone app is the cheapest part!
And another reason for the Nexus One that we know today, will be just yesterday’s news. When iPhone release their 4G.
There has been a lot of hype and tension erupted after the unveiling of the nexus one. Today, we are seeing some of the errors and glitches that a future user may want to look before buying the N1 phone. As they said, 530 USD has never became cheap. Details: http://bit.ly/nexus-one-disadvantages-compiled-details
lol….go outside…
It all depends on the kind of conversion the packager will perform. If it is a code translation, which I think it is, it will be difficult for Apple to ban those. In fact it may even be difficult for Apple to identify those apps.
Agreed.
Can any of you multiply $99 by 2 million? That’s a lot of money Apple will see when Flash developers purchase their Apple developer license. That’s a lot of incentive for Apple to not care what tools are used to create iPhone apps.
There are already other non-apple tools for creating iPhone apps available. Flash will just be another one. I’ve seen demonstrations of Flash apps with hardware acceleration running quite well, and better than the alpha ones currently released.
I think the only thing that would be holding back would be the network provider. Is would work well through wifi. But the towers? I can already see At&t bitching about people watching stickam live feeds on there iPhone over the air.
Yes I too agree…
There are already Flash developed apps on the appstore, produced form the betas. There is a problem with them, in that CS5 stores everything in one class, so they are big and slow.
I doubt apple will block this, why should they? They make money on each app sold, and as long as we get some new, original ideas, all is good.
There are apps in the App Store right now that were created with Flash.
and they fucking suck
I agree that Apple would still stop them.
My view is its not so much trying to promote their own SDK over another, but Apple’s convoluted view that QuickTime should be the video standard.
The thing I don’t understand is isn’t YouTube running Flash? How come their App or videos work?
And (OK, off the rails a bit) I”m amazed that we’re still talking about Apps like they are nirvana. Hasn’t anyone heard of software before around the TC offices? The brilliant idea was the App Store concept. Not the apps themselves. All other smartphone providers had a chance and blew it by not having a sanctioned method to get to Apps. I down loaded more Apps on my iPhone in the first hour of ownership than I ever did for the Windows phone I had for years. However, the App Store, in its current state, has outlived it’s usefulness. This and not supporting Flash is Apple making the same mistakes as they did with the Mac. Unless they are happy with single digit market share. Sorry, had to get that off my chest.
Video surely plays a part in it, but I really do think it’s about Apple not wanting another way to create apps on the device. Especially not one that’s known to be slow. Adobe may have worked and worked, but Flash is still shit on anything that’s not Windows.
Allowing Flash (and Silverlight, and others like that) opens up all kinds of possibilities for the device to stop “just working”. Apple’s kinda anal about that, and with good reason.
YouTube displays their videos using Flash, but underneath it’s MPEG4. The YouTube app (and some browser plugins/userscripts) grab that delicious MPEG file and play that.
Furthermore, yes, I think Apple is perfectly happy with that single digit market share. Screw marketshare, anyway, they’re making boatloads of profit. =]
“My view is its not so much trying to promote their own SDK over another, but Apple’s convoluted view that QuickTime should be the video standard.”
You absolute MORON, you do realise the format your beloved Youtube videos now use is the same format Quicktime uses. Just the flash player tediously renders it using 100% of the processor and the Quicktime player uses about 4%
Just say whats on your mind and use 4% of the angst instead of 100% and your processor might run better, too.
Yup, what’s far more likely is that the majority of iPhone overs will move over to the next fashion phone.
Honestly, this will be about as effective as Quark’s efforts to turn DTP pros into webmasters by adding “publish to web” functionality within QuarkXpress.
The interesting part of this will be how it affects the “other” web app packager/creator services/apps. If all the simple iPhone apps can be made “for free” with a copy of Flash CS5, rather than paying a company $2-300, will we see a lot more being offered by such companies to give us our money’s worth, or will that market simply implode as every flash jockey on earth starts pimping their iphone app creation skillz on craigslist at $50/pop?
I disagree with Erik S. : iPhone Apps build in Flash ? Naaaaaaaaaa… too slow and many limitations.
John Gruber on Daring Fireball has a much more interesting opinion : http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/tablet_musings
I think Apple believes that Flash will die….and they will help to make it happen.
Am i wrong ? Maybe , but if Flash will not come to the iSlate/iTablet , it’s the final word..
If Apple wanted Flash , they will let Adobe create a Browser App with Flash support, no more then that (never a Safari addin).
Adobe is trying to market CS5 surfing on the iPhone hype…
The issue isn’t the fact that they are developed in Flash. The concern is that the Flash system (independent of the App Store) circumvents Apple as the gatekeeper. Apple should have no issue with a Flash application compiled into a native app that has to use the exact same channel as all other apps. Development tool is irrelevant in that case.
god you guys are idiots. iphone apps created with Flash still go through all the Apple approval channels to be accepted into the app store. Apple stands to make $99 x 2million for each apple developer license. They’re not going to deny access to iPhone developers who choose to use Flash tools.
Silverlight is FTW
The most important thing about Silverlight on the iPhone is …
Netflix on the iPhone
Silverlight has BTW gained over 50% market share today. If you are tracking the stats, SL is gaining about 1% every week. I’m quite happy to see that.
Market share of what? MLB used Silverlight in the 08 season then switched back because it was too glitchy( well as i experienced it).
There are hardly any sites of consequence built with SL. It might have 50% market share in Seattle on MS projects, buts thats to be expected. Outside of that I’ve seen nothing that supports your statistic of 50% adoption. Crazy!
And I am quite sad. Another proprietary standard to rule us all.
I wonder if its still profitable to build iphone app beyond 2009
With all the free games that are already available online in flash like Bejeweled or the Moron test, why would people pay and download the app if they can bookmark the site and play them for free…
Gaping hole?
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve really needed Flash to work in 2 years of using my iPhone.
Apple will never put Flash on their devices, because Flash is a CPU waster, and Apple would rather HTML5 and Ajax apps win out here.
Also, the author is wrong about video on the web. The browser doesn’t play “Flash video.” What happens is the website developer must create an iPhone-viewable video and enable their player to recognize an iPhone viewing the page, and give them a way to view it. E.g. YouTube’s web pages show iPhone-clickable videos because that’s how YouTube rigged it. It’s not automatic, and “Flash video” isn’t taking over the web, although Flash-based video PLAYERS have. Behind the scenes, that Flash player may still be playing a standard format, like MP4.
As for this Flash -> App converter, I’ll reserve judgment until I see what it can do. I don’t see how (or why) Apple would have a problem with it, as long as it’s generating standard apps that don’t use private API calls.
I can tell you, however, that if these apps don’t look and act like native iPhone apps, I won’t be using many of them.
Get off Apple’s jock, please. When a major site (YouTube) has to reencode it’s entire library because Jobs is too mad with power, something’s fucked up. I have an iPhone and I love it. But there’s this thing called Hulu that I love far more. I don’t give a damn if Flash is CPU intensive. So are these 1080p pornos I watch all day. Give Flash an off/on switch in Safari like JavaScript. Otherwise, I will jump ship to a phone that doesn’t constantly remind me of 1984. Like, maybe something with Android on it.
“When a major site (YouTube) has to reencode it’s entire library because Jobs is too mad with power…”
They don’t, underneath it was already MPEG to begin with. Also, the iPhone is not the only device that gets non-Flash. Ever tried mobile YouTube? You get 3G movies. Ever tried the HTML5 YouTube? You get MP4 movies.
But don’t let that stop you from watching 1080p pr0n on your Android device. =]
Totally agree. And also I think HTML5 is the future of video on the web. Flash based video players vary so much in terms of functionality (beyond video playback) and implementation that they often ruin the user experience. I’ll be happy when I can visit any web page on my iPhone or Android phone and just watch the damn video.
It’s not just Apple that’s standardizing on H.264. The mobile industry is as a whole is as well. The reencoding that Google did is not benefiting Apple only.
I agree that it’s not a gaping hole, but it is a fair sized hole for me.
I’ll tell you where I have needed it — many restaurant sites are with Flash in the browser.
A fair number of times (more than a handful), I’ll be out trying to figure out which restaurant to go to, and I can’t see their menus on the iPhone because Flash doesn’t work.
I don’t like Flash (for other reasons), but I wish it would play on the iPhone.
Hopefully Apple will lump them all in one category.
Flash 99.9% of the time (YouTube being a rare exception) is useless and just annoying. We’ll just see more misleading screenshots and descriptions that the App doesn’t live up to.
I hope Apple at least makes some sort of filter.
That is like saying HTML is useless 99.99% of the time because you came across myspace. Again, flash is a platform. It is only as good as what the developers decide to build with it.
And flash developers all hang out on myspace.
QED.
Slow news night? Adobe announced back in October that Flash’s IDE would export iPhone apps. What has changed since then?
ummm… nothing except that we have a “new” half cooked story
Techcrunch has some of the biggest jerks as commenters
Yes, we are testing the Packager now to convert our HHOTT Show widget to get it running on iPhones. HHOTT Shows are built automatically from any YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and soon facebook accounts in real time. You can check out the one we built for TechCrunch at http://hhott.com/2010 that includes all videos from its techcrunch YouTube account and all photos from its crunchies2009 Flickr account. Feel free to use our http://hhott.com/ beta site to build one or more HHOTT Shows from your YouTube, Flickr, and Picasa accounts. It takes only a few seconds to do so and you may be surprised to uncover some videos or photos you don’t even know. Hope soon you can enjoy our HHOTT Shows in your iPhones too.
Andy
For the fun of it, you can see TechCrunch HHOTT Show running in a simulated iPhone at http://hhott.com/hsi.htm
I think we need to wait for what capabilities Adobe will bring to table . From what I have read and seen about the initiative (you can check them at Adobe website), a few things need to be ironed:
1. The interface generated from CS5 looks crap for iPhone compared versus the actual flash application
2. Not all the features are directly portable to iPhone platform given lack of support
3. This does not mean that you will be able to see flash webpages in safari. It simply means that any AIR application can be converted to iPhone application. (Note: AIR applications are far fewer than flash applications embedded on web)
As such I think this post is misleading on the potential impact of Adobe’s decision. While I see this as a positive step, Apple still retains control of what gets approved, so Adobe still doesn’t get a free rein unlike it will on Android or WinMo or Symbian or RIM or WebOS….
Flash is yesterday’s technology. Silverllight is the future of the web.
I’m a flash developer, and I could really care.
The flash community tends to have a range of experience, from simple timeline animators to much more experienced developers. From what I can tell most of the more experienced developers have taken the time to look into iPhone development, if not already created an app.
I love my iPhone, and I love Flash, but I have yet to see myself in a situation where I wished the two worked together.
For Adobe I’m sure this will catch the eye of the timeline tweeners that really want to play house as an iPhone developer, but for anyone worth their salt, they’ll take the time learn the platform and use it effectively. Expect lot of simple 2d games, calculators, and physics demos.
This would be useful to developers who don’t want to or can’t make the investment in developing an iphone app through Apples approach
If you don’t want to learn obj-c and pay the $100, then why spend $500+ on flash cs5 and make something with actionscript which won’t be as robust? Doesn’t make sense.
Any serious developer would take the time to figure it out.
It’s also the OS. With CS5, you can develop in Windows, don’t need to get a Mac setup.
Yeah I think this is also the reason apple is blocking this…
I can just see the flood of Flash apps and games hitting the app store, it would be insane and seriously Lame…
To allow flash apps would just flood the market, if you do a search now on Flash games you will see site after site of flash games…
Now add all of those to your iPhone and you have a ridiculous amount of apps – and most of them will be pretty silly… (while some will be good – the flood would just be too much) -way too much.
Lets just leave the apps the way they are made now -because adding flash you would just release the flood gates…
I think apple understands this all too well, hence the reason why it’s not approved.
that’s pretty gangster of adobe
I’d hope that between Google Droid/Nexus One, Adobe and others, that Apple gets the pressure to become vastly more developer friendly than it has been with shipping apps on the IPhone.
http://bit.ly/66CZAf
I’m just wondering..It was not long ago that most tech sites including TC were mostly about the promising internet technologies…
When and why did they all move to cover all things mobile..Maybe the internet as we knew it had plateaued..But then,that was much more a global phenomenon..
iPhone, Nexus One, Droid,etc. are all predominantly American..Ok maybe not the iPhone..And the other phones too will launch in other countries soon..But weren’t those mobile-focused websites been covering them all along..
I think it has less to do with Apple trying to train people to use their SDK and more to do with Apple
wanting to continue being able to force people to go through the App store to get ANY applications.
If they were to allow flash web apps, people wouldn’t need to go through the app store at all. People could just add a home screen bookmark to the iPhone formatted flash app webpage. That would subvert Apple’s 30% share in app store sales, as well as their tight control over whats available to put on your iPhone.
Not only that Lyle. The bigger issue Apple wants to avoid is for the apps to be a commodity. If the apps are Flash apps then any phone that has Flash support can run them. Today’s Apple’s biggest win is 100,000 apps in the app store that no other phone can run.
You can actually do this if you want. Take a look at “Pie Guy”: http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy
As everyone knows, this is actually what Apple originally encouraged everyone to do.
This is not a flash app. This was made with Javascript. Yes, it is an impressive Javascript game, but its not flash. Even with Javascript’s massive improvements over the past few years, its still not a replacement for Flash/Silverlight. There is only so much you can do with Javascript.
“People could just add a home screen bookmark to the iPhone formatted flash app webpage. That would subvert Apple’s 30% share in app store sales, as well as their tight control over whats available to put on your iPhone”.
You don’t need flash to create web apps. Even today you can build an app in any standard web technology and have the user add a home screen bookmark and subvert the app store.
“Most video on the Web, including everything on YouTube, is displayed through a Flash player…”
On my Mac, I haven’t needed Flash to view something on YouTube in a loooong time. YouTube will happily push you an H.264 clip if you ask.
Presumably the iPhone just asks.
Anyway, Google ClickToFlash. Your CPU will thank you.
@jeff – You’ve never gone to a web site that uses Flash on your iPhone and been bummed that it didn’t work? Not just video, although that’s a huge loss — there are a LOT more video sites than just YouTube and they are out of luck on the iPhone.
Check out http://www.modelinia.com for an example. It uses Flash for videos, slideshows, and all sorts of content and navigation. Except for the blog it’s practically useless on the iPhone
One of the best things about the iPhone is you can go to practically any site in Safari and it just works — except sites that use Flash.
Why should a site owner have to create an app?
Not really. Even when I see that big ‘missing plugin’ icon, I just figure I’ll check out whatever it was on my computer. Not to say that process isn’t annoying, but most of the time the flash I can’t see wasn’t made for such a small screen. No major loss.
If I can’t check out modelinia.com I can’t say I’d be all busted up about it. That wouldn’t look very good on such a small screen, which is why most modern sites have mobile versions of their content (cnn, flickr…), to accommodate for the screen.
I don’t think the site owner needs to create an app for what they’re doing – just use html and create a mobile version.
Imagine trying to stuff fwa.com onto an iphone screen. My eyes would bleed.
“Why should a site owner have to create an app?”
I agree, it defeats the purpose of flash in the first place.
Adobe is just trying to widen it’s market for CS5
The only way to get your technology onto apple’s playground is to do deals with them. That’s how Silverlight streaming was allowed, MS got explicit approval from apple.
Adobe forcing it’s way in there, allbeit using generated native apple code, is not the way to go.
Adobe should have kept trying to work out some formal approval because right now apple can and im guessing will pull these apps.
Thou if they do the sh#t storm that will erupt would be massive.
The same could be said for MonoTouch where basically silverlight apps are automatically converted into native Apple apps. Miguel and his team haven’t gotten formal approval from Apple and risk being rejected sometime down the line.
I am looking forward to seeing how all this pans out
PS. I can’t stress enough that the only way to do business with Apple is to get there explicit approval and play by there rules. Thats what you get working with apple technologies, CLOSED SYSTEM PERIOD!!!
MonoTouch 1 is only for .NET. MonoTouch 2 will indeed have support for Silverlight/Moonlight based apps.
But there are not only already apps in the Iphone AppStore made with CS5 betas, There were already one or two projects that allowed to port Flash based apps to the iphone.
I seriously doubt that Apple will stop Adobe. Adobe is not a lightweight company and there is still lots of Adobe Software that Mac OS X relies on to tarnish their mutual interests. The other reason is that such move would be seriously Anti-Competitive and you can be that if Adobe complains on that. Novell and others would join in the complain..
But it would be actually very interesting to see Apple do that since it would be a very good spectacle to watch how they get out such PR and posible Antitrust blunder….
Microsoft isn’t doing anything special. Silverlight isn’t on the phone. They’re using Silverlight server-side to push H.264 video to the phone.
just what the app store needs.
more crap.
all hail the crapp store.
Well this is GREAT news allowing me to create iPhone apps with-out having to hack around on the schools Mac to build a iPhone as I prefer to use Windows 7 at home. I will be able to do my development from my PC. This is great news how ever I don’t think Apple will keep it around to long but who knows?
@erick- good post. +1 for Flash on iphone being huge.
As an ex-macromedia, adobe employee, my perspective might be a little biased, but I think your reader might find value.
Flash really lowers the barrier of entry for mobile development, on not just iPhone, but other platforms as well.
ActionScript, which is almost like Javascript, is a lot simpler for web developers to build mobile apps, than learning Objective-C.
Moreover, vector graphics are a huge help when creating an app that’ll run on various screen resolutions. Yes, the iPhone only has one resolution, so the value isn’t that much, but soon that could change with the tablet, and if devs want the same app to run on Android phones etc.
Apple should support this, and I bet in 2010 we’ll see Flash running on iPhone.
Coincidentally, this just got posted to TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2010/01/10/dear-apple-what-we-want-to-see-for-iphone-4-0-part-1/
80% of over 1000 people responding want Flash support.
Cross-platform development has been promised many times before, but rarely does it work as well as advertised. What Adobe is attempting to do is similar in concept, and I wouldn’t get too excited until we see how well the Flash SDK translates to an iPhone app.
Happy Trolltech/Nokia QT user here! Iphone development is actually the only thing that’s ever thrown me into a situation where I couldn’t construct an application of 90%+ fully cross-platform components. BTW: haven’t used it as I see no real need, but Novell has had a proprietary C#/.NET to Objective-C/Cocoa Touch cross-compiler on the market for a few months now. Not sure why Adobe’s product has gotten so much more attention.
I just wish adobe would fix flash for Mac generally. It’s such a PoS – jerky video on a 2009 MB Pro – wtf? Maybe if they gave a damn about apple users generally, apple might not be so reluctant to allow flash on the iPhone.
Steve Jobs is still pissed off that Flash is more popular than QuickTime. That’s why Apple won’t help Adobe fix Flash.
A lot of people don’t realize this but the Flash player for Mac would be better with some cooperation from Apple. For example Apple won’t allow access to the H264 hardware acceleration which would make a big difference. Even Microsoft, which has a competing product (Silverlight) is more open to the OS than Apple is. So in a nutshell it’s not really Adobe’s fault that the performance on Mac is less than the Windows version.
Ha!! I had no idea that playa hating was the root cause of the poor Flash performance on the Mac. Interesting…
Apple is fighting a just fight. Adobe wants to own the language we use for the internet. Adobe wants to own the lifeblood of the internet. Adobe is to the internet what Monsanto is to soybeans. We do not want to all be dependent on Adobe.
Absolutely agree with Nick on this one. Don’t we all just want to consume online content as we wish? Audio and video content encoded using proprietary technology has no business on a free, public community, like the Web. These technologies have been decelerating innovation for more than a decade. With developments such as html5 we won’t even miss Flash and the likes.
Simply put a Youtube video in your page. It will work in iPhone, Android and Symbian. For anything else develop a game.
Oh, with Flash on my iPhone I’m going to hear the secret integrated iPhone Fan. Just like on my Mac.
The apps exist on the phone today.
We’re in the private beta and we have apps in the store already that were created in Flash. The Flash apps get converted to native iPhone code prior to being submitted to the app store, so to the device they’re no different than those that were written in Xcode and Objective C.
More saturated market is what i see coming. If that happens will have to figure out new strategy for Iphone development.
Will Apple want to stop it? This would lose them control of the dev platform for the iphone/ipod touch it’s true, but they’ll still be making their 30% on any non cocoa touch app compiled into an iPhone app.