This Tuesday rumors were buzzing and news items published around the globe reported that Adobe has chosen to finally join the game, forgoing a collaboration with Apple and instead deciding to independently develop a Flash player of their own for the iPhone. Well, just as the saying goes, it seems to be all talk and no walk.
During a video conference held two days ago, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen said that in order to provide users with a complete web-browsing experience, support for Flash must be enabled. “Flash is synonymous with the internet and frankly, anybody who wants to browse the web and experience the web’s glory really needs Flash support”, said Narayen. “We are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we will work with Apple. We’ve evaluated the SDK, we can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves and we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device."
The only catch is, Adobe still desperately needs endorsement and approval from Apple, not to mention some help.
It turns out that the folks at Adobe haven’t quite digested all of the terms and conditions of Apple’s recently announced SDK package before making these kind of declarations. Contrary to the statements made by Adobe, a Flash player is in no way considered a third party application, such as games or instant chat applications, but rather an add-on which is to be embedded in the iPhone’s Safari browser, and completely dependent on the device’s operating system – just as any other video player.
In the terms and conditions of the SDK, it is clearly stated that the development of add-ons is frowned upon by the design gurus at Apple – developers are allowed to develop only third party apps unless given Apple’s blessing and approval.
Even if Adobe will eventually develop an independent player as a third party application, Apple’s approval would still be required in order to include the new player in Apple’s official application download store, the AppStore. Personally, I don’t see Adobe releasing a player meant for iPhones that have been through the Jailbreak circuit or allowing the installation of unofficial third party applications.
For obvious reasons, Adobe will instead prefer to develop an application which is to be installed via the AppStore, or officially embedded by Apple in the iPhone’s future releases.
Was Narayen’s statement a miserable blooper, or a genius stunt in public relations?
Adobe and Apple are well-known for their collaborations over the years. On the one hand, Apple head honcho Steve Jobs has claimed that Adobe’s Flash player is not suited for the iPhone, being too “heavy”, and that the Flash Lite player, which is tailored specifically for mobile devices, doesn’t meet Apple’s vision for the ultimate viewing experience on the iPhone.
On the other hand, Adobe is left wondering how come the Flash Lite player, which was adopted by big names in the mobile industry, such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung and Sony-Ericsson, just isn’t good enough for the likes of Steve Jobs.
One delightful notion is that Adobe and Apple are indeed in cahoots developing a Flash player that will be incorporated in future versions of the iPhone, just as they were when they developed a Flash player for the Mac’s operating systems, and that Narayen was just stirring up some drama.
Whatever the real story is, iPhone users are still waiting for a Flash player.
Until then, here is a partial solution – a Java application which converts Flash videos for the following sites:
blip, clipfish, godtube, metacafe,myspace, myvideo,putfile,rofl, sevenload, video.google, videotube,youtube , youporn
Here is a video explaining how to use this application and access videos on your iPhone:
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