Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said his company's long-running dispute with Apple over its refusal allow Flash on iOS devices is behind them, and that the issue is of diminishing importance because of Android's rise anyway.
"What you saw with smartphones hitting an inflection point with Android, you'll see it again with tablets," he said in an interview at the AllThingsD conference with Walt Mossberg. "There will be another 20 tablets that will come by the end of the year that will push the industry in different directions."
Apple's decision to keep Flash off of iOS devices epitomizes the company's philosophy of control over its mobile platform. This approach has allowed the company to maintain a famously consistent and easy-to-use environment on its mobile devices, even as some users have fled that restrictiveness for the Wild West openness of Android.
Narayen said that Apple's real issue with Flash was not technical but business-related: he hypothesized that the software's ability to run Web apps in a browser undermines the centrality of Apple's App Store, taking control from Apple over the iOS experience.
Yesterday I had a chance to visit the Adobe booth in the BlackBerry World solutions showcase area. I wanted to ask the Adobe guys about Creative Suite 5.5. We were told, during the keynote session that morning, that this most recent version of Adobe's developer tools allow you to program a Flash app for Playbook without needing to use any other tools.
As it was explained to me, what actually happens is that a developer creates a project and tells the Creative Suite environment what formats he wants to output in. Imagine building a simple game. You'd tick off the appropriate boxes for whatever formats in which you want to export your game. Android? Apple iOS? Playbook? Check, check and check.
In a note sent along with the release, Adobe said, "Please note that users of the Motorola Xoom and other tablets that run Android 3.0.1 will not be able to experience Flash Player improvements until the devices receive an upcoming update to Honeycomb."
Adobe is ready for Android yet it seems that Android is not ready for Adobe. The saga of Honeycomb's missing features continues.
Adobe today announced software to develop, test and deploy mobile applications on devices running Android, BlackBerry and Apple's iOS.
Developers have been able to use Adobe products for more than seven years to build applications in desktop browsers and can soon use the new tools to apply their skills to various mobile platforms, Dave Gruber, group product marketing manager for Adobe, said in an interview.
"You'll leverage Adobe Air again, except across iOS, Android and BlackBerry," he said. "It's one tool and one framework and one code base."
