Adobe To Develop iPhone Flash/Media Player After All
By Rafat Ali - Tue 18 Mar 2008 08:52 PM PST
So the hide-and-seek game of egos ends, at least nominally: Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE) CEO Shantanu Narayen said at a conference call with investors that his company is finally working on a media player for Apple’s (NSDQ: AAPL) iPhone, which means Flash will come to it. Apple released its software developer tools last month, and Adobe’s been working on it since. The tools will let Adobe build a Flash player for the iPhone, then distribute it through Apple’s iTunes online store, he said, reports WSJ. Question remains how long would it take...this sounds like a non-answer answer from Adobe, and not sure what if anything would it take from Apple side to enable or disable Flash.
This comes after months of the waiting from the industry for the online video standard to come onto the iPhone. As late as early March this year, Steve Jobs said that Flash just wasn’t good enough for the iPhone..he said the current Flash player performs better on larger devices such as laptops, and thus, performs too slowly on the iPhone.
Since the iPhone’s launch last summer, the device hasn’t supported Flash, meaning that iPhone users haven’t been able to view a vast bulk of internet videos on their handsets, as most online videos are formatted for Flash. YouTube is the only online video provider to go out of their way to format their videos especially for the iPhone. Also, it’s not a secret that Adobe and Apple haven’t always been on the best of terms.
