Flash on the iPhone? Still a lot of work to be done

The work at Adobe Systems toward getting its nearly ubiquitous Flash technology onto the Apple iPhone goes on and on.

Speaking with the Bloomberg news service on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen acknowledged that even after months of striving, a workable version of Flash for the iPhone remains a tough nut to crack.

Narayen told Bloomberg Television:"It's a hard technical challenge and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating.

"The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."

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Some reaction to the Bloomberg report has taken Narayen's words to suggest that Apple is pitching in like never before. But we've seen that kind of generality before in regard to Flash for the iPhone, dating back to March 2008, when Adobe first confirmed it was working to bring Flash apps to the iPhone. And even then, it was apparent this would not be a simple chore.

As Adobe said at the time: "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 [the iPhone software development kit] and the current licence around it."

Two weeks before that, in early March, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had thrown cold water on hopes for a happy Flash-iPhone co-existence. The PC version of Flash, he said, "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, while the Flash Lite version for mobile phones "is not capable of being used with the web".

However far along Adobe actually is with reconfiguring Flash for the iPhone, it will need a definitive thumbs-up from Apple to bring the technology to the public.

In November, Adobe talked up a new push to broaden the use of Flash on mobile phones. "We are in the midst of evolving Flash Player 10 for mobile," chief technology officer Kevin Lynch said at the time. "We're taking the full Flash Player and making that run on the higher end of the mobile market." Conspicuously absent from the presentation was the iPhone.

Lynch said in the November presentation that the company was confident enough to move up its goals for making phones Flash-enabled. "We're actually going to get one billion Flash-enabled phones by 2009," he said.

Original article: Adobe CEO: Flash on iPhone not so easy from CNET News.com