Offering Adobe CS5 as an alternative development tool for the iPhone is a stroke of bittersweet genius. It lowers barriers to entry for aspiring iPhone developers and creates a go-to-market strategy for creatives who don’t have the programming chops to do it today. To be overt, Objective C is the main reason more developers DON’T create iPhone apps, and the main reason iPhone app development is neither rapid nor user-friendly. So there are some real plusses to the heat Adobe is giving Apple here.
More access to friendly development tools = more iPhone apps = a more mature and varied iPhone marketplace. Everybody wins, right? TechCrunch even headlined their post about this, “the year Flash’s 2 million developers come to the iPhone.”
Maybe not. Sorry TechCrunch.
When Adobe announced that it will include an iPhone “packager”, that is a program that will package Adobe Flash programs as iPhone apps, my initial reaction was, “Great, now I can do that time entry app I’ve been envisioning for my company’s web-based trouble ticketing system.”
But I quickly realized that this packager is only going to produce iPhone-runnable Flash apps, and the full set of iPhone APIs will likely be out of reach to Flash developers. The telephony APIs and other niceties XCode jocks get to use will probably still be off limits, to say nothing of distribution of the apps. It will be very easy for Apple to spot a Flash app on its way through the App Store submission process, and disapprove it. In fact, the rejection of the packaged Flash apps could be automated such that there’s not even any oversight–and on similar grounds Apple used to reject the Commodore 64 emulator last year.
Not to mention that fact that other apps that could benefit from Flash’s presence (like Safari, to say the least) still won’t be able to run custom-made Flash client programs.
So maybe Apple will come around–but in the mean time, I don’t think this announcement is nearly as significant as it sounds.
