No Flash Support for the iPad – Ever!
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Via his blog, Mike Chambers (Adobe principal product manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe) admitted that his company was no longer investigating iPhone/iPad-based Flash development, at least for now.
Resources dedicated to the iPhone platform will be re-focused on other platforms, such as Android. According to Chambers “Fortunately, the iPhone isn’t the only game in town. Android based phones have been doing well behind the success of the Motorola Droid and Nexus One, and there are a number of Android based tablets slated to be released this year. We are working closely with Google to bring both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 to these devices, and thus far, the results have been very promising”. Both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 for the Android platform are targeted to be released later this year.
The decision was taken in a direct response to the upcoming revision of the iPhone developer program license (still at a draft stage for now), which explicitly rejects the use of private APIs, and restricts the languages developers are allowed to use in order to build their Apps. According to Chambers, “Essentially, this has the effect of restricting applications built with a number of technologies, including Unity, Titanium, MonoTouch, and Flash CS5. While it appears that Apple may selectively enforce the terms, it is our belief that Apple will enforce those terms as they apply to content created with Flash CS5″.
Besides the traditional web-based flash apps that have been incompatible with the iPhone platform since day 1, a few native iPhone/iPad Apps available at the App Store were actually built using Flash CS5. Chambers told developers they “should be prepared for Apple to remove existing content and applications (100+ on the store today) created with Flash CS5 from the iTunes store”. However, there is no indication of such a move from Apple yet.
This news shouldn’t surprise anybody, as Steve Jobs himself criticized Flash several times over the last years. Apple is heavily pushing for the next release of HTML (HTML5), considered by some to be the “Flash killer”, by providing many new native features such as bitmap manipulation (canvas), geo-location, much more freedom for developers to run local apps/runtimes via the browser (web workers, websocket…), and most of all, native support for video.
