Building Applications for the iPhone with Flash
This morning during the day 1 keynote at Adobe Max 2009, Adobe announced that the next version of Adobe Flash (Flash Professional CS5) will include support for creating stand-alone applications for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch.
Context & Ripple Effects
Adobe has been working toward this endpoint for two years: Flash Lite 3 brought Flash video to handsets back in October 2007, and a February 2009 push around better distribution and higher payouts for mobile Flash apps signaled Adobe wanted its developer base earning money on phones, not just desktops.
Today's announcement at the Adobe Max 2009 keynote completes the loop differently than expected: rather than waiting for a Flash Player in mobile browsers, Flash Professional CS5 will compile stand-alone applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. VentureBeat's same-day framing captures the trade-off precisely — Flash developers get the App Store, but not Flash websites running on the device. Coming a day after Adobe confirmed its Omniture acquisition, the company is visibly repositioning from web-plugin vendor to a broader application and measurement platform.
First-order effects
- Flash's large installed base of designers and developers can now target Apple's App Store through a tool they already own, bypassing the need to learn Objective-C and Cocoa Touch for each project.
- Apple sees a potential surge of Flash-authored submissions into App Store review — all of which still have to clear Apple's approval process before reaching users.
Second-order effects
- Rival smartphone platforms now compete against Adobe's reach into millions of Creative Suite seats, raising the stakes for whoever offers Flash-class developers better revenue splits and distribution — the exact levers Adobe pushed in its February mobile-apps initiative.
- Third-party cross-platform toolmakers (game engines, porting shops) suddenly face competition from Adobe giving away device packaging inside CS5, pressuring their pricing and bundling.
Third-order effects
- If App Store review accepts Flash-built binaries at scale, mobile development structurally shifts toward cross-platform authoring layers, weakening the lock-in value of any single vendor's native SDK — with Apple's review pipeline as the choke point that decides how far the pattern goes.
- For the open web specifically, the analyst concern raised alongside Adobe's merger wave sharpens: if high-value interactive work consolidates inside compiled Flash apps distributed through gated stores, the browser-based Flash ecosystem Adobe built its business on loses its center of gravity.
The trend: Mobile development is moving from per-platform native SDKs toward cross-platform authoring tools, with app-store gatekeepers rather than runtime vendors setting the terms of access.