Steve Jobs says no Flash on the iPhone anytime soon

Apple Insider is reporting that Steve Jobs announced at a Company Shareholder's meeting on Tuesday, that there is no plans for a Adobe Flash plug-in to be running anytime soon on the iPhone. Saying that for flash to work on the iPhone, there would need to be allot of work done by Adobe to re-work the plug-in for the iPhone. Also adding that FLashLite, (scaled done Flash for mobile devices) isn't widely supported and wouldn't run much better either because of the same hardware limitations.

Here is an excerpt from the AppleInsider.com Article:

Flash on the iPhone

Less technically inclined pundits have expected Apple to release a Flash plugin for the iPhone that works identically to the plugin used on desktop computers, similar to how the iPhone supports viewing PDF documents or Microsoft Word and Excel files. The problem is that the Flash runtime has never been designed to work on anything outside of a desktop computer, which has almost unlimited access to processing power and few constraints on battery use, available RAM, or heat dissipation.

The iPhone is a very different product. It's a fraction of the size of a laptop battery and uses a low power, embedded ARM processor that works unlike the Intel Core or PowerPC processors used in Macs and PCs that can run Flash. In order to develop a Flash plugin for the iPhone, Adobe's proprietary software would need to be recompiled and optimized for the ARM architecture, which isn't something Apple could easily do independent of Adobe.

Read the entire article for a full understanding of the reasons that there may not be any Flash on our iPhones anytime soon.... unless a third party application developer decides to take up the challenge, but distributing a hacked version of the Flash plug-in would be illegal, and definitely challenged by Adobe. Maybe and hopefully with the delivery of the SDK Road Map and the actual SDK in developers (like Adobe's) hands maybe we will see something.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/05/steve_jobs_pans_flash_on_the_iphone.html