Adobe this week has expressed confidence Apple will cave eventually on its stubborn blocking of Flash on the iPhone.
It’s one of the IT industry’s great battles of wills: Adobe wants to get Flash on the hugely popular iPhone, and Apple has blocked the technology at every turn. But with growing consumer pressure on Apple to support Flash – and Apple needing to make a case for its upcoming iPad – Adobe this week has expressed confidence Apple will cave eventually.
Adobe has been proactive in recent months working with smartphone vendors to find ways of delivering Flash applications onto their devices. At this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company announced it is bringing its Air (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application platform to devices powered by Google’s Android and Research In Motion’s Blackberry OS operating systems, and possibly others.
“Our goal is to provide a consistent runtime that spans devices, inclusive of [mobile and] desktop operating systems,” Flash marketing director Adrian Ludwig said at the event, where Adobe is also demonstrating Flash Player 10.1, which will bring parity with the desktop versions of Flash and run on Windows Mobile, Android, Palm WebOS, Symbian, and BlackBerry OS powered devices.
Adobe has been locked in a battle of wills over Flash with Apple, which has previously claimed the technology is buggy and so processor-intensive that it would compromise the usability of the iPhone. Two years ago, for example, Steve Jobs slammed the platform during Apple’s annual shareholder meeting; he repeated the sentiments at a town hall meeting earlier this month, where he purportedly called Adobe a ‘lazy’ company
Adobe has denied the claims its software is buggy, and has said it is ready to go with a version of Flash on the iPhone but is being blocked by Apple from getting low-level access to the iPhone that’s necessary to properly implement Flash. As a workaround, Adobe has offered developers tools that encapsulate Flash applications in an iPhone-friendly application wrapper, allowing them to be delivered to customers through Apple’s App Store.
Apple’s motivations for blocking Flash have frequently been attributed to more commercial realities: because it provides an alternative and unmanaged way to get applications running on the phone, Flash could easily break Apple’s tightly controlled App Store, which features over 140,000 titles and recently marked its 3 billionth download.
Apple has not said what proportion of these are paid-for titles, but there is clearly enough revenues at stake that the company has been willing to continue blocking direct Flash applications.
Apple was caught up in an embarrassing situation after the January 28 iPad launch, when apparently-doctored product demonstrations showed the Flash-powered New York Times Web site running on the iPad – which also lacks Flash functionality. The situation sent Apple backpedalling and outraged fans who have been vociferous in their criticism of Apple for stonewalling.
The latest comments from Adobe suggest that, having failed in direct negotiations with Apple, the company is laying siege to the iPhone by Flash-enabling every other smartphone on the market. With Apple pushing the iPad as a complete Web browsing experience, the heat could be turned even higher.
“I suspect what will happen is that as we have more devices in the market… Apple will have more market pressure to include Flash on the iPhone,” head of Adobe’s platform business David Wadhwani said this week. “Apple would like to move rich content off the web and into its App Store, where it can more readily monetise it….Ultimately, the consumer will decide.”