Adobe CEO: We’re working on building Flash player for Apple’s iPhone, iPod touch

“Adobe Systems Inc. has begun work to create a media player destined for Apple Inc.’s iPhone [and iPod touch], Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen said Tuesday, thus adding a new wrinkle to a standoff between the two long-term partners,” Ben Charny reports for Dow Jones.

“In comments widely reported last month, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said the company’s iPhone [and iPod touch] hadn’t adopted Adobe’s mobile version of its Flash program because of technical and performance concerns. At the time, he suggested Adobe work on a new version of the player,” Charny reports.

“On Tuesday, when asked about the issue during a conference call with investors, Narayen said the company had since obtained the software developer tools Apple released last month. The tools will let Adobe build a Flash player for the iPhone [and iPod touch], then distribute it through Apple’s iTunes online store, he said,” Charny reports.

Full article here.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Len” for the heads up.]

Adobe will distribute it through iTunes Store if Apple approves it, is what Narayen should have said. Given Steve Jobs’ most recent statements about Flash, that’s a big “if.”

[UPDATE: March 18, 10:20pm EDT: Adobe backpedals on Flash for iPhone statements]

36 Comments

  1. @ bioness
    “All apple needs is a photoshop killer…”

    Of course, that little nugget is right up there with saying something like, “All Apple needs is a cold fusion hardware device.”

    OK, I’m exaggerating, but you get my point.

  2. It will be interesting to see if Adobe can make Flash perform somewhat decently. Frankly, I think most of Adobe’s apps are very slow to load and perform. They seem to prefer adding features, some of which are of little use, rather than improving performance. I doubt Adobe can make a Flash player for the iPhone that won’t bog it down.

  3. FLASH NEEDS TO BE ON THE IPHONE – Period. Apple advertises the iPhone has having a complete web browser… well’s that’s not completely accruate without flash. Anyone up for a class action law suit for false advertising?

  4. Ok…As much as I don’t like bloated all-Flash sites, there are many tasteful and useful implementations of Flash on the net. It has some very good strengths as does CSS, AJAX, HTML, etc, and sure kicks the crap out of GIF animations (at least graphically) for most things. Primarily, using vectors in an animation vs. bitmap graphics is key for me…to just name one aspect. Every last Mac/PC you can buy in a store has the Flash plugin already installed. If you don’t want to run the plugin or load banners, you don’t have to – so stop crying! haha.

    I do print work in addition to web design and have seen plenty of badly designed pdf’s sent to me. Does that mean using pdf’s is a bad practice? I’ve seen just as many poorly designed CSS/HTML websites, too.

    Safari for iPhone was touted as a complete browser, but no Flash plugin simply means that statement was false. Not exactly what His Royal Steveness sold us on…it was supposed to be a “full version of Safari and Mac OS X”.

    We’ll be seeing some cool new upcoming stuff by web developers like Animated CSS in the near future and hopefully it will be compatible with all browsers cross-platform. However, there are some things that can still ONLY be done in Flash. When there’s a replacement for EVERYTHING it does, then it will go away or Adobe/Apple will relabel it or succeed it with the ‘new thing’. I still have lots of clients that request Flash to be used in their websites, so the demand is there. Even if I feel there is an alternative for a certain function for what they want to do, they often tend to be stubborn about it, so I have to deliver Flash because they’re paying the bill.

    Flash is simply not going away for a while (unfortunately the same is true for IE, hehe).

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