The long-standing rivalry between Apple and Adobe Systems heated up last week following the release of the latest incarnation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, particularly changes made to section 3.3.1 which effectively banned the use of the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Flash-to-iPhone converter. Adobe has since announced that they are dropping iPhone development technology after CS5.
Flash support was not included on the iPad
Throughout 2010, Steve Jobs and Apple made it very clear that they do not like Adobe. They prominently left Flash off the iPad, instead promoting HTML5 at every opportunity despite the fact that 75% of all videos on the web are developed with Flash and 70% of online gaming sites support it. By neutering it, Apple deals another blow to Flash. It’s also a major setback for any developers that were building iPhone apps with Flash as a backbone — they will almost certainly have to start back at square one.
Despite research continuing to show the iPhone as the more popular platform for today’s mobile developer, Adobe and Flash have long been part of the developer ecosystem and it will be interesting to see what was previously seen as convenience becoming more significant when choosing which OS to develop for in the future.
