Just a quick follow-up to a post I made a while back iPhlash or just a flash in the pan.

Well as I suspected Apple were not going to let this happen blindly!
Mike Chambers has just announced Adobe will be removing this feature due to Apple’s latest SDK terms.

In fact what is almost humorous about this is that Apple have forced Adobe into removing this functionality just before Adobe publicly release their upcoming “give me another $1000″ (CS5).

With Adobe’s announcement last week at Adobe MAX that they have added export to iPhone in an alpha version of Flash CS 5, there has obviously been a lot of discussion about this.

There are various strands of discussion, however the strand that interests myself is that of whether Apple will actually allow this.

Some background…

Apple have from the start had a very closed environment for developing iPhone applications.
Amongst many things:

• Developers must sign-up (and pay) for the privilege of being able to publish to the iPhone.
• Developers must use only documented API’s from the Cocoa API.
• Developers must not publish anything that can load in other code (eg a runtime such as the Flash Player, and this point has been the most problematic to Adobe).
• The only way to get an application onto the iPhone is by submitting it to Apple who check it conforms to all their rules before it goes onto the app store (which is the only way to distribute iPhone applications).

One of the reasons for this closed environment is so that 3rd party applications all look and work in a similar fashion, are all stable and wont interfere with other aspects of the iPhone.

The obvious problem for Adobe is that this means they cannot get the Flash Player onto the iPhone and Apple have not bowed down to the sometimes very public pressure Adobe have been putting on them to put/allow the Flash Player on the iPhone.

So what Adobe have done is found a way to allow its users to output native iPhone applications from the Flash IDE – therefore not requiring the actual Flash Player.
However, and importantly, these output applications are not Objective-C Cocoa Touch applications.
There is also as yet no information whatsoever from Apple as to whether this technique of bypassing the runtime is to be endorsed.

This last point is very important. Apple has historically been very tough when it comes to getting applications through their approval process. They have created an environment whereby they retain a very tight control of the applications that get onto the devices. And while there would be no actual Flash runtime on the device, there would be an ecosystem of iPhone development that Apple had much less control of.

The two biggest concerns for Apple would be a) performance and b) lack of look and feel.
Regarding performance, obviously to a large degree this comes down to the developer. But if the byte-code Flash spits out is of poor quality, then its down to the tooling (Adobe).
Regarding look and feel, this again in largely down to the developer, however Adobe is working on a mobile version of the Flex framework (codenamed Slider) and it would be highly likely many iPhone apps would make use of this and therefore not look and feel like iPhone apps but look and feel like Flash apps. And from a user experience perspective, this is very bad for Apple. Apple have always been keen advocates of precise and consistent user experience, as always reflected in their Human Interface Guidelines.

So all said, do you really think Apple are going to quietly let this happen?

I really hope Adobe are doing this with the full support from Apple. If this is the case, we have some great things to look forward to from Adobe. If not, well, just a flash in the pan.