Adobe Flash Plug-in for iPhone

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Whilst Adobe have been known to be working on bringing a Flash animation plug-in for Apple’s iPhone for some considerable time, Adobe have now confirmed that they are teaming up with Apple to make flash on the iPhone a reality due to what Adobe term as the ‘hard technical challenge’ of bringing fully featured Flash (not Flash Lite) to Apple’s device.

“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” says Shantanu Narayen of Adobe. “The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.”

The major hurdle appears to be the fact that Steve Jobs considers Flash Lite – which would have been far easier to implement – far too feature limited in terms of functionality whilst standard Flash (as used on desktop PCs) is far too resource heavy for use on devices such as the iPhone. The result being the need for a new variant of Flash that’s having to be developed specifically for the iPhone (and, we suspect, that’ll port nicely to other smartphones at some juncture) that manages to provide broad functionality whilst requiring less processing power and less resource requirements than the standard, full-blown Flash plug-in.

Until now Adobe have seemed confident that this could be achieved without Apple’s assistance but according to reports just surfacing, this is no longer the case – though the extent of apple’s involvement in the development of the new flash plug-in remains uncertain.

Needless to say, we wait with baited breath for further news as there’s no doubt that Flash functionality on the iPhone would not only be universally welcomed but is long, long overdue.

[Via | AppleInsider]