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Adobe Scores a Winning Run Against Apple

Today’s big announcements at Adobe MAX signal bold moves to strengthen the reach of the Flash Platform while simultaneously heading off Apple’s reluctance to offer the plugin in Mobile Safari. By allowing Flash Professional CS5 to export to native iPhone app code, Adobe wins big by giving its massive author base the means to get in on the App Store action. As a Flash developer myself who has made repeated but ultimately failed attempts to tackle Cocoa Objective-C this is very welcome news. When you’ve spent years in one language, the brain gets hardwired and is resistant to learning something so radically different. Plus, Flash developers invested so heavily in the platform, it’s a bitter pill to swallow and drop it all in favor of being locked into Apple’s ecosystem.

However, allowing Flash designers to bulld iPhone Apps means that we will see abuses of human interface guidelines and a deluge of submissions into the approval process. We can expect Apple to push back on this in whatever way they could to preserve the brand integrity of the iPhone experience.

In terms of expanding the Flash Platform into greater ubiquity, the announcements of RIM, Google and Palm joining the Open Screen Fund heralds an imminent reality where Flash content will run just about everywhere except in the iPhone Mobile Safari. By 2011, those blue question mark icons that appear where Flash browser plugin content is supposed to run will likely become a marketplace liability for Apple. Indeed, when customers can enjoy Flash enabled websites that work on every device except Apple’s, we finally imagine a scenario where not supporting Flash in Safari could actually affect sales. The demonstration of Flash Player 10.1 working very nicely on a Palm Pre underscored this notion.

Before today, I was thinking that the centrality of Flash as a de facto multimedia “standard” was in question. These thoughts were inspired by the advent of the App Store and improved web standards browser implementations such as CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and the CANVAS and VIDEO elements. However, after today, my confidence in Adobe’s ability to maintain strong support for the Flash platform is renewed by their clever responses to the shifting marketplace by resisting the force of fragmentation or at least channeling it into their advantage.

Flash haters like Gruber will remain skeptical and vaunt the merits of standards and Cocoa over Adobe’s assets. But the truth remains that there is a massive author base that knows Flash and an even larger consumer base that expects Flash content to run on their smartphones.

Video spoof of Mythbusters that Flash isn’t on the iPhone
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