The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Adobe intends to bring the Flash platform to Apple’s iPhone.
Flash has been a heavily debated subject between Apple and Adobe. Rumors suggest that Adobe and Apple have aruged terms and conditions of porting the Flash platform to iPhone, leaving Apple with the argument that Flash, similar to Java, is a platform that is not optimized for a mobile device. Both Flash and desktop Java have been core features of Mac OS X on the desktop since its initial release.
Likewise, Adobe and Apple have indicated that Flash Lite, a minimalist version of flash designed for phones, is too underpowered to justify running on iPhone.
While it is not fully clear the implementation, Adobe insists that Flash, and not Flash Lite, will be brought to iPhone. Conflicting reports inject the notion that Adobe will rely solely on the publicly-available SDK released earlier this month from Apple, however, that is not fully clear. Adobe may be using additional resources to implement a browser plugin.
Without additional support from Apple, a Flash player would be limited, and run in a nature similar to Adobe’s AIR platform. Flash would not be able to run in the Safari web browser, and only certain applications would be able to hand off to an external Flash player application (similar to how YouTube currently runs on iPhone).
