Davis Farris

It has been reported by many sites such as The Unofficial Apple Weblog, The Apple Blog, Gizmodo and Engadget that a Flash player, created by Adobe, would be coming for the iPhone. What do you think?

At the beginning of the year in March there was much speculation that an iPhone suitable Flash player would be out on the market for download.  CNN Money was one of the first to announce Adobe's plans to begin work on a Flash player for the iPhone.  Why is it so hard to create a Flash player for the iPhone.  The drawback at the time for Adobe was the iPhone SDK.  Belgian iPhone coder Thomas Joos already created a Flash player for the iPhone.  You can see the video at the bottom of this post.  Yes, he created this Flash player but it was not approved by Apple and it was being run on a hacked iPhone.  Still, no real version of the Adobe Flash player for the iPhone.

Since the iPhone NDA was dropped Adobe will have a better chance of creating a Flash player.  It was just recently that many of the sites listed before are reporting that Adobe will try again.  Mike Downey on his Adobe blog said:

"Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it. We think Flash availability on the iPhone benefits Apple and Adobe's millions of joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring these capabilities to the device."

Because of Apple's strict policies it is up to Apple to follow through and allow the Flash player to work on the iPhone.  

We will see if Adobe will create a Flash player for the iPhone.  It won't be a disappointment if nothing happens, again.  All of us iPhone users can hope for a Flash player and all those non-iPhone users can hope as well so they don't have to hear us iPhone users complain for the player.