Adobe stops campaign for Flash on iPad, iPhone

The Adobe Flash project manager said he has officially thrown in the towel on developing an iPhone Flash packager for future use, though the Creative Suite 5 iPhone packager will still be released.

Both Apple customers and Adobe have begged Apple to include Flash support, but the Cupertino tech company has shunned Adobe’s popular software offering.  Instead, Apple has urged developers to make apps specifically for the iPhone platform, even though some people are enabling their Flash programs to run secondary on the iPhone.

“I think that the closed system that Apple is trying to create is bad for the industry, developers and ultimately consumers, and that is not something that I want to actively promote,” noted Mike Chambers, Adobe Flash Principal Product Manager.  “As developers for the iPhone have learned, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to be prepared for Apple to reject or restrict your development at anytime, and for seemingly any reason.”

Adobe threw one last jab Apple’s way by saying the company has no interest in utilizing cross platform tools, which will limit apps based on Flash CS5, Unity, MonoTouch, and Titanium.

I’m disappointed but not entirely surprised Adobe and Apple couldn’t agree to a limited use of Flash on Apple products.  Apple continues to defend its anti-Flash stance by saying Flash is “closed and proprietary”, while Apple already uses open standards on the iPhone and iPad.

I don’t support what Apple is doing in this particular case, but understand why Jobs wants to shut Flash out.  It’ll be interesting to see if consumers are willing to purchase the latest iPhone even though it won’t have Flash support — or will consumers wait for more Flash-based handsets?

Even though Apple customers may lose out, mobile Google OS users will win now that Adobe promised to focus more on Android.  The budding partnership could also be used to annoy Apple, with Google and Apple continuing to compete heavily in the mobile phone, netbook and other markets.