According to cnet (and other wildfire postings across the blog-o-sphere), Adobe is planning on doing their own Flash player on iPhone (through installed apps courtesy of the iPhone SDK).

Here is what Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen had to say (in part):

“Well, you really believe that 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.

We were very excited about the announcement from Windows Mobile–adoption of Flash on their devices–and the fact that we’ve shipped 0.5 billion devices now, non-PC devices.

So 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.”

See: news.com, and appleinsider, electronista, engadget, plus more more references (… well, at least it’s not reported like this (that’s a joke, BTW)!).

Anyways, I would guess since “Flash Player” was used in the earnings call – transcript, we are talking Flash 8 or 9 … but that is TBD.

Also, I am guessing that Adobe legal read through all the fineprint in the Apple iPhone apps distro agreement, and found that it is possible to put their runtime on the device (I do seem to recall reading about Sun’s announcement of their JVM port to iPhone being “premature”).

All, in all, it’s just great to know that Adobe has plans to work with Apple so perhaps there is a chance (in addition to Flash apps) that potentially iPhone customers will be able to browse the mobile web without having (arguably) a broken user experience!

However, whether or not there is a possbility of a ecosystem and/or way to monetize mobile content through Flash on iPhone is still a bit premature to speculate on.

Until an official press release from Adobe is released we won’t know what the exact plans are … so, once again, we move on to, other, more evolved mobile platforms with Flash; that actually exist in the marketplace … today

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 9:47 am and is filed under Adobe, Apple, Consumer Electronic Device, Embedded Devices, Flash, Flash 9, Flash Lite, Flash Lite 3.0, Flash Mobile, Flash Mobile Developer, Gadget, Handsets, Mobile, Mobile Content Distribution, Mobile Device, Mobile Ecosystem, Mobile OEM, flash 8, flashlite, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.