Steve Jobs may have dissed Adobe's Flash media player, calling it slow and unfit for the company's iPhone, but that's not stopping Adobe.
During a conference call with investors on Tuesday, company chief executive Shantanu Narayen said that even without Jobs' blessing, Adobe has the tools to start working on an iPhone-specific version of the media player now that Apple has released its software developers kit.
"We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone," he said during the call. "We have evaluated (the software developer tools) and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves."
Still, developing an iPhone Flash player is one thing. Getting it approved by Apple is another. Apple's current iPhone developer guidelines seem to require that all third-party software be released as standalone applications rather than as plug-ins. Scott Gilbertson (on Wired.com's Compiler blog) suggests that Flash might fall outside Apple's SDK framework because it executes compiled ActionScript. As a result, it remains unclear how or if Adobe will be able to flout these guidelines in order to bring Flash to the iPhone.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball estimates that Adobe is as deluded as Sun and its Java porting plans, because the iPhone SDK terms explicitly state: "No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and builtin interpreter(s)."
Sun announced last week that it also plans to use the SDK to develop a Java virtual machine (JVM) for the iPhone.
"And without approval from Apple (including APIs beyond those in the current third-party SDK), they can distribute it in the same alternate universe as Sun's supposedly-in-the-works Java port," Gruber says.
Mac developer and founder of Red Sweater Software Daniel Jalkut has a different take.
"I'm not sure Apple would be too upset by the prospect of Adobe building the player themselves," he says. "In a sense, this is a perfect example of how the SDK can take pressure and responsibility off of Apple and put it completely on another company's shoulders."
While Jalkut admits there are likely other issues the two companies would need to sort out, ultimately, he says he wouldn't be surprised if Apple lets Adobe ship a standalone Flash player via the AppStore.
We're contacting Apple and Adobe for further comment, so stay tuned.
[Via WSJ]
