Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen, speaking Monday on an earnings call with analysts, updated his company’s efforts to make Flash videos work on the mobile version of Apple’s Safari browser.
We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.
The addition of Flash to the iPhone would be great for users because much (if not most) of the video on the Web is posted in Flash and thus unviewable on the iPhone.
That wasn’t a big deal with the first-generation iPhone and its slow cellular network, but the iPhone 3G has a fast enough connection to watch video.
Still, Apple has shown no enthusiasm for Flash. Indeed it has done much to block the development of an iPhone version of Flash.
Why won’t Apple give any iPhone love to Adobe? AppleInsider explains the feud in its three-part Flash Wars series but here’s the gist:
This stance was partially driven by the company’s determination to prevent the shabby Flash experience on its Mac platform from spilling over to the iPhone. Since Flash code is interpreted not by the Web browser but rather a plug-in, that’s left Apple and other platform vendors reliant on Adobe to provide a suitable and stable runtime environment. That didn’t happen with the Mac, as Adobe focused the majority of its efforts on polishing the Windows plug-in while the Mac version fell behind in both features and performance.
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs has also been openly critical of Adobe’s fragmentation of Flash into desktop and “Lite” versions, stating that neither are suitable for use on his company’s handheld products. Specifically, he said the desktop version “performs too slow to be useful” on the iPhone while Flash Lite is similarly useless in that it’s not fully capable of running the plethora of content written for the desktop version.
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