Adobe Flash Coming to iPhone – Bringing 2 Million Developers With it

Apple keeps holding Flash away from its flagship phone even though it seems that Adobe keeps asking nicely to join the party.

It sounds like this may change soon and with Flash comes Adobe’s 2 Million or so Flash Developers and they’re all heading towards the iPhone – whether Apple wants them or not!

The next version of Adobe’s Flash developer tools, Creative Suite 5 (currently in private beta), will include a “Packager for iPhone” app which will automatically convert any Flash app into an iPhone app. So while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app. (Microsoft is taking a similar approach with Silverlight). This is a bigger deal than many people appreciate.

As you know, most video on the Web (YouTube, etc) is displayed through a Flash player and even though Apple says that there’s problems with Flash it certainly seems to run ok on Android.

As well as the video playing Flash can be used to create Web apps. Apple kept Flash away not so to control the video experience on the iPhone, but because it needed to establish its own Apple-controlled iPhone SDK.

If you think that there’s plenty of apps to chose from now just wait ’til 2 million more developers join the current 125,000 iPhone app developers!

My word!