Adobe Turns Down Heat on iPhone Flash

A day after Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) CEO Shantanu Narayen let the news slip that Adobe was working on building a version of its Flash Player for the iPhone, Adobe tried to temper the expectations that Shantanu's remarks spawned.

News that some form of the Flash Player would be coming to the iPhone came during a quarterly earnings call Tuesday when Narayen told investors that the company intended to bring its technology to Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) high-profile handset.

"We are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone, and we will work with Apple," Narayen said. "We've evaluated the SDK [software development kit], we can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves, and we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device."

However, in a statement released late Wednesday, the company appeared to back away from the stance that it was fully ready to develop the technology itself.

"Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience, we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it. We think Flash availability on the iPhone benefits Apple and Adobe's millions of joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring these capabilities to the device," Adobe said.

Spoke Too Soon?

Much of the Web's animated and interactive content, including advertisements and videos embedded in Web pages, uses Adobe Flash or Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA)' Java -- neither of which run on the iPhone. For instance, YouTube works on an iPhone only because Apple and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) partnered to build a special portal specifically for the device.

With his comments, Narayen gave hope to users and mobile Web designers that they would soon be able to create and view Flash-based content on the iPhone. However, the software developer kit that Apple released this month is limited in scope and does not grant the type of access to the iPhone that Flash would need in order for Adobe to implement it.

"The net of it is that now that companies have the software developer kit, companies are looking at what capabilities are there, and how I read these announcements, there are things needed for the Flash Player that are not readily available in the software developers kit," said Bill Hughes, an Instat analyst.

A Plug-In Problem

The problem for the Adobe in terms of the iPhone is that the Flash Player is a plug-in, not a third-party application. In order for the company to build something for the iPhone, it would require access to code for Safari on the iPhone. Apple has said probing that deeply into the iPhone platform is forbidden for third-party developers.

"We don't know how full-featured the [SDK] is, and what Adobe found by interpreting this is that there were things they need that weren't enabled in it," Hughes said.

The question now is whether Apple will give Adobe what the company needs to bring Flash to the iPhone.

"Having Flash is a very important capability on the iPhone and it would be in Apple's best interest to enable Flash capability because it challenges any of Apple's efforts, and it's in their interest to have full Web capability," Hughes explained.