The subject of Flash on the iPhone is a rather difficult one; on the one hand you have the consumer, who longs for the technology to become available on the device they've paid for, though in contrast you have Apple, which is against the idea (at least according to Steve Jobs).The software giant Adobe, known well for its design products such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash, has provided a solution to having Flash on your Apple device, though it's not exactly what most people would think. The purpose of this is to create iPhone applications built with Flash itself, as opposed to Objective-C & Cocoa in Xcode, using the CS5 version of Adobe's popular media software; this doesn't in any way mean that Safari-based Flash is coming any time soon. Flash CS5, currently in beta (though not publicly until later this year), has had a website set up by Adobe here for the purpose of showcasing the technology, demonstrating how well the applications run as well as advertising applications which have already been built with this method (yes, there are already commercially available Flash-based iPhone apps on the App Store).
A senior product manager at Adobe, Aditya Bansod, said in a blog post, "We created a new compiler front end that allowed LLVM [Low Level Virtual Machine] to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code. When you build your application for the iPhone, there is no interpreted code and no runtime in your final binary. Your application is truly a native iPhone app."
If you're a developer and you're keen to try this out, you can sign up for the beta, in order to get access as soon as possible. Otherwise, the final version of Flash CS5 will be available in the distant future. This will no doubt mean many of the popular web-based Flash games available on the Internet may be hitting the App Store sometime next year (or perhaps the end of this year), which is great for developers as well as consumers.
80% of people dont know what silverlight is and dont think it is light years better than flash. why fix when it is not broken.
a bit annoying tho that iphone doesnt support flash.
1. Dumbfounding.
2. Zune is an insignificant niche market.
3. Current Flash devs will get their stuff onto the iPhone easily.
4. LLVM compiles Actionscript into native ARM code, so it's fast.
This is better IMO than having a browser plugin for flash.
It sounds more like a way to conserve battery life to me to get those figures up.
Similarly, getting something like Flash or Silverlight ported to multiple mobile platforms will mean no more developing just for WM or Android or WebOS or Symbian, etc. You develop an app or a game in Flash and immediately it will work on any platform.
iPhone wants to stand out and doesn't want to risk app store profits. It makes sense as they make a fortune from them. Other platforms without the huge app base have more to gain. I personally can't wait for a native flash player on my Palm Pre. There are a ton of web games I would love to see ported and it would follow with the whole "using web technologies to program for the phone" theme.
Apple knows that Flash transfers control to the developers, which cuts into Apple's profits.
Apple would be stupid not to allow these apps in their market, after app if 10,000 flash devs release paid apps tat are interactive then that's a lot more money in Apple's pocket.
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