So they put “Flash” on the iPhone

It wasn’t that much of a surprise, all the hints were there from the press releases yesterday morning (19 of the top 20 handset manufacturers) to the big grid of Open Screen Project partners with room for 1 more logo.

But the thing that concerns me most about Adobe’s announcement (that Flash CS5 can compile to iPhone) is that there were no Apple representatives at MAX. It’s still unclear if what Adobe is doing is sanctioned by Apple.

Flash on the iPhone has been something developers have been asking for since it’s launch, I myself had an email exchange with an Adobe Evangelist who was as excited about the possibilities as I was.

My feeling on the whole thing is more frustration at Apple than respect to Adobe. Frustration because I want to have as close as possible the same web experience on my mobile device as I do on my desktop. Finally the Open Screen Project is coming of age with the release of Flash Player 10.1 and half of it’s focus on Mobile integration.

I have major respect for Flash Player 10.1, there are some awesome features in there that the community have been asking for for ages. I won’t repeat them all here, you can go and read about them on labs.adobe.com

One thing that’s clear is that this latest update will be shipping with devices by the middle of 2010, what’s unclear however is if Adobe have improved the deployment mechanism to update the Flash Player on devices, previously with Flash Lite this has been a major problem. Even if we can’t update past 10.1 we’ve still got a very feature rich Flash Player version on Mobile.