After Apple’s announcement of their iPhone OS 4 SDK license:
Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine
This came a couple of days before Adobe shipped their latest Creative Suite 5, which contains a native Flash to iPhone compiler. Sadly this compiler can only (legally) be used for iPhones running the iPhone OS3 as the license of iPhone OS 3 still allows it. Anyway at the end of june the iPhone 4G is expected and thus the new iPhone OS 4 will be released under those heavily limiting terms.
Mike Chambers of Adobe now responded publicly to Apple’s moves:
We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.(..)
The primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices. However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms. There is plenty of commentary online about this, so I won’t belabor the point, but I have included some links below that cover it more depth:
So, was all of the work on the iPhone packager a waste of time and resources? No, I don’t believe so. We proved that:
- There is no technical reason that Flash can’t run on the iPhone
- Developers can create well performing and compelling content for the device with Flash
via Mike Chambers’ Blog…