As you’ve no doubt heard (and heard, and heard, and heard, and heard…), there is some new news about the ever-so-popular subject of Flash support on Apple’s iPhone. However, the reports of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan’s comments about Flash support on the iPhone during yesterday’s earnings call were not necessarily complete and accurate (shocking!!!).
Here’s what Shantanu said (as can be confirmed by viewing the recording of the call here):
“Well, you know, we really believe that Flash is synonymous with the Internet and frankly anybody who wants to browse the Web and experience the Web in all its glory really needs Flash support. I mean, we were very excited about the announcement from Windows mobile adoption of Flash on their devices and the fact that we’ve shipped a half billion devices now, non-PC devices — so we’re also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we’ll work with Apple. We’ve evaluated the SDK we can now start to develop the Flash Player ourselves. And,we think it benefits our joint customers so we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.”
And here is Adobe’s follow-up, official statement:
“Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it. We think Flash availability on the iPhone benefits Apple and Adobe’s millions of joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring these capabilities to the device.”
I hope that helps clear things up.
UPDATE: Adobe’s Bill Perry has a more detailed post about this issue
UPDATE 2: I forgot to mention that Microsoft recently announced that they are licensing Flash Lite and Adobe Reader LE for the Windows Mobile OS so all future Windows Mobile devices will automatically be Flash and PDF-enabled.