One of the biggest complaints about Apple’s groundbreaking iPhone has been that it doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash for interactive animation and video. But late last week Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said his company is working with Apple to make it happen.
“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason that Adobe and Apple are collaborating,” he told the Bloomberg News Service in an interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “The onus is on us to deliver.”
Good News, Bad News
Fans of the iPhone are taking the comments as both good news and bad news. The good news is that Apple and Adobe are working together. The bad news is that Flash on the iPhone probably won’t be ready any time soon.
The Flash technology is installed on an estimated 98 percent of all personal computers, as well as on about 800 million handsets. A version of Flash already runs on handsets with the Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems, and a version for Android phones is being developed.
But Flash on the iPhone was panned last year by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who said regular Flash technology runs too slowly on the iPhone and Flash Lite wasn’t robust enough.
One of the reasons to get Flash on the iPhone is that Apple has promoted the idea that the iPhone shows the whole Web, not a “dumbed-down” version. But, since Flash is so widely used, it’s not possible to show the whole Web without it.
Some observers have suggested that the issues of Flash on the iPhone are not only technical, as difficult as those hurdles may be, but also business policy.
Apple Dragging Its Feet?
When Apple released its software development kit (SDK) last year for the iPhone, making third-party application development possible, Narayen said his company was…