Adobe and ARM Announce Joint Optimization Project; Will it bring Flash to the iPhone?

November 2009

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Whenever there is news that Apple will be releasing the latest iPhone firmware soon, we are hopeful that it will include support for Adobe's Flash. It is one of the most requested features by iPhone users since its launch.

However, Steve Jobs had pointed out in March that the current Flash player is not suitable for the iPhone as it performs too slowly on it.

Today's announcement by Adobe and ARM might change all that. They have jointly announced that they will be collaborating to optimize and enable Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR for ARM powered devices.

Adobe's Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen had raised hopes in March when he commented that Adobe had downloaded the iPhone SDK and are planning on building a Flash Player for the iPhone and distributing the iPhone app via Apple's iTunes App Store.

In September, Paul Betlem, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe, had again confirmed that Adobe is indeed developing a Flash Player for the iPhone when he was asked a direct question by the audience at a Town Hall meeting at the Flash on the Beach Conference.

But today's announcement seems to suggest that Adobe has finally realized that they need to optimize the current flash player which is more suitable for computers to be able to run it on mobile devices like the iPhone.

As per the announcement:

"The collaboration is expected to accelerate mobile graphics and video capabilities on ARM platforms to bring rich Internet applications and Web services to mobile devices and consumer electronics worldwide.

The joint technology optimization is targeted for the ARMv6 and ARMv7architectures used in the ARM11™ family and the Cortex™-A series of processors and is expected to be available in the second half of 2009."

This means that the joint optimization project could bring Adobe's Flash player to the iPhone which currently uses the ARM11 family of processors.

Despite Adobe's efforts to make its Flash player suitable for the iPhone, it could still get rejected as iPhone's SDK prevents Adobe from launching a fully integrated version of Flash for the iPhone.

The bad news is that even though Apple decides to approve it, we will have to wait until the second half of 2009 to watch the flash-only videos on the iPhone.

Update:

Brian Chen of Wired has just posted a related article over at Wired: Why Apple Will Never Permit Adobe Flash on the iPhone?

He believes that allowing a development platform like Flash would be too dangerous for Apple as it could divert business from Apple's App Store.

He points out that might be the one of the reasons Apple has the following clauses in its iPhone's SDK agreement:

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise" and

"No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

What do you think?

[via Mac Rumors]

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