Views on the new media market: Flash on iPhone

At the World Economic Forum in Davos Bloomberg conducted an interview with Shantanu Narayen of Adobe. The inevitable question came up "When will Flash be on the iPhone?" - truly Shantanu must be bored with that question. The blogosphere seems to have widely interpreted the answer as "any day now" - but the actual wording isn't any different to earlier questions to Adobe staffers on the same issue "when we get it working"

Not withstanding the fact that it's hard to get Flash working on mobile devices (it's hard to move any "PC centric" codebase to a mobile device) it's reasonable to assume that it will happen. When it does happen it's bound to be like London busses - wait ages, and then 3 come along at once. (Nokia S60, Android, iPhone and Windows Mobile?)

So what will change in a new "Full fat flash" world on mobile?

Mobile video will become far easier to use

Flash has had a dramatic impact on video on the web. Flash is on every PC and in every browser. As a video distributor you can trust that consumers will be able to watch your video without needing to go through a painful install process.

Mobile video consists of many different formats - there is one consistent format, that used by 3G (h.324) - and even though any phone can access video in a consistent way by just dialling a number this hasn't taken off. Flash video will change this - firstly it will become increasingly hard for network operators to charge a premium for "video" - as Flash video can be delivered over normal HTTP streams. It is also likely to drive flat rate tariffs - after all few consumers are likely to be happy that they get charged extra for the on page video advert that uses up lots of bandwidth.

Rich Mobile Applications will be a real opportunity

Rich Internet Applications, whether delivered with Flash, AJAX, or another framework that builds on these building blocks will become a real opportunity. If you want to deliver a great, free application experience to smartphones today you need to build at least (if you are sat in London)

iPhone application and register with the AppStore for free download
Android application and register with the AppCatalog for free download
S60 application, get it Symbian Signed - you can then distribute from your own website
Blackberry application

Contrast this with building just one flash application and passing the URL out to people - simple to build and maintain. What will suffer here is native application development - as people will be able to achieve much using Flash & web technologies native application development will become more focussed on niche applications where native is essential - performance applications such as 3D games are a good example.