Louis Gerbarg on the Technical Details of Flash iPhone Apps

Louis Gerbarg, after inspecting the contents of the IPA file from an iPhone app produced with Flash CS5:

Technically speaking, these do appear to basically be within letter of the SDK agreement, modulo the fact that Adobe appears to making private API calls. They should be able to do what they need to without making those calls, so ultimately that should be a non-issue.

Now, the notion that what this thing emits is indistinguishable from something Xcode emits is laughable. They are very different, and not in a good way. While the apps may get acceptable frame rates on an iPhone 3GS, they don’t on earlier hardware, and they almost certainly uses substantially more power battery than native games.

(Via Michael Tsai.)

★ Thursday, 8 October 2009