Flash on iPhone Hopes Dashed

From PC World: Adobe has confirmed that Flash capabilities won't be coming to the iPhone anytime soon. Company CEO Shantanu Narayen recently discussed the difficulties in bringing Adobe's most well distributed product to the iPhone. "It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating," Narayen told Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."

Flash is one of the most common programs found on computers across the globe. For the Web, Flash is most commonly used to play videos on websites like YouTube and Hulu, and is the force behind those annoying dancing ads found on many Web pages. Despite its popularity, however, Flash has been conspicuously absent from the iPhone.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs created a mini-controversy in March of last year, when, during a conference call with reporters, he said Flash was not good enough for the iPhone. Jobs dismissed regular Flash as too slow for the iPhone, and Flash Lite-Adobe's version for mobile phones-as not "advanced enough" for the Jesus Phone. There has also been some speculation that the biggest barrier to Flash is that it technically violates the iPhone's Terms of Service.

Nevertheless, a few weeks after Jobs publicly dissed Flash, Apple released its iPhone Software Development Kit, and Narayen said that a path was now cleared for Adobe to develop Flash for the iPhone.

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