Nathan de Vries

Despite the speculative bullshit that always seems to spout from Walt Mossberg and Robert Scoble’s mouths, we still don’t really know what’s driving Apple’s decision to not support Flash content on the iPhone. They’ve also removed the Flash content from their website, which leads me to believe that this issue runs far deeper than I previously thought.

Adobe’s recent announcement of H.264/AAC support (among other things) in their Flash Player 9 product, has overnight turned Adobe’s Flash Player and Apple’s Quicktime Player into competing products. If you read between the lines, however, you might see something interesting:

“Adobe has licensed the x86, PowerPC and ARM versions of MainConcept’s H.264 and AAC decoders”

Keyword, “ARM”. Previously, Adobe have not had a Flash Player 9 SDK for the ARM architecture. For this reason, products like the Opera Browser on the Nintendo Wii have needed to settle for Flash Player 7, or in the case of Apple’s iPhone they’ve decided not to settle at all and instead ignored support for Flash altogether. Now, it seems that Adobe might be planning on releasing an SDK for the ARM architecture since the H.264/AAC support only affects the version 9 product.

Once Adobe releases an SDK, Apple will have the means to support the plugin on the iPhone. As an added benefit, they won’t need to worry about licencing On2’s VP6 codec since the H.264 videos which currently play on the iPhone, iPod and iTV will also play within the Flash Player too. Not only that, but the annoucement from Adobe also mentions support for reading iTunes metadata (“list” atom) embedded in audio and video files.

Adobe are playing straight into Apple’s hands!

So what’s Apple going to do about it? Should they embrace these changes and welcome Adobe with open arms? Keep in mind that according to the Adobe FAQ, “new releases of Flash Player take approximately 12 months to reach 90% penetration”. We’ll see this Flash Player in the wild as a release version sometime in September, so I expect Apple to have at least polarised by then.

I honestly hope that they chose to support the Flash Player. By doing so, they will put the power back in the hands of the content providors. While this doesn’t mean I expect them to re-instate Flash content on their own website, at least we’ll be left with a choice in the matter.