Flash CS5 Will Build Native iPhone Apps

John Nack:

Today at Adobe MAX, the company announced that Flash tools will be able to build applications for iPhone that can be distributed through Apple’s App Store. A beta version of Flash Professional CS5 with this new capability is planned for release later this year. These aren’t Flash SWF files, they’re native iPhone apps.

This is not a port of the Flash runtime. You can’t use this to load Flash content over the web. What it means is that Flash developers can export native iPhone apps — compiled ARM binaries in .ipa packages — which can then be submitted to Apple through the normal App Store process. There are already seven such apps (built using beta versions of the new Flash developer tools) available in the App Store.

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

★ Monday, 5 October 2009