Adobe Flash Player for iPhone Awaiting Apple's Approval

Adobe officials are cited as saying that a Flash Player application for Apple's iPhone is now awaiting the company's approval for download through the App Store. Speaking at the Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference in Brighton, Sr. Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems, Paul Betlem, stated that an iPhone version of their Flash Player should be expected “in a very short time.”

Despite the fact that Apple didn't offer support for this app, Adobe went forth with creating the flash player, and is now keeping its fingers crossed for both acceptance on the App Store, and good operability once the app is downloaded and fired up on users' handsets. The Adobe official confirmed to the press that the iPhone Flash Player was to be released shortly, should it pass Apple's App Store screening process, AppleInsider reports.

Specifically, he said Flash Lite "[was] not capable of being used with the web" because it did not support the same types of Flash media accessible by the traditional version of Flash player on the PC. On the other hand, the version built for PC was dubbed a resource hog that "perform[ed] too slow to be useful" on the iPhone.

Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen confirmed in March that his team of engineers had begun work on a version of Flash for the iPhone. "We believe Flash is synonymous with the Internet experience, and we are committed to bringing Flash to the iPhone," Narayen said. "We have evaluated (the software developer tools) and we think we can develop an iPhone Flash player ourselves," Adobe's Chief Executive added, also in March, this year.

Apple, however, has always been resistant to adopting Flash for iPhone. Apple's own Chief exec, Steve Jobs, once said the company needed something in between the flash player aimed at cellphones and the one used by laptops, which are either too simple (for the former), or slow down the iPhone (in the latter’s case). The iPhone "needs something much better than the current Flash player that Adobe makes for cellphones. The Flash Player option that fits the bill is made for devices like laptops that are larger than the iPhone; as a consequence, it performs too slowly on the iPhone," Jobs said. "There's this missing product in the middle," he concluded.

It will be interesting to see if Adobe's latest work is going to serve the iPhone well. In the meanwhile, share your thoughts below.