Looks like Adobe is getting increasingly restless about Apple’s lackadaisical approch towards bringing Flash to the iPhone. 

Now in a seeming attempt to place the blame squarely on Apple, Adobe is taking the issue to the iPhone users themselves. 

Now iPhone users trying to access Flash content on their handsets are shown this message from Adobe: 

“Apple restricts use of technologies required by product like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch”. 

It sounds like a last-ditch effort by Adobe to bring Flash to the iPhone users. Many previous attempts to talk to Apple about bringing Flash have only ended up in empty promises. This has been because Apple has always suspected the Flash player of bringing down the performance levels of the iPhone and Steve Jobs has in fact gone on air saying that he has not been particularly impressed with Adobe’s offer for the iPhone. 

Recently, Adobe had launched a beta version of Flash Professional CS5 that enabled app developers to port their Flash applications to the iPhone platform. However, users looking to access Flash based web content on their iPhones have remained unlucky so far.

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Once thought to be building Flash for the iPhone mostly on its own, Adobe has mentioned at the World Economic Forum that it’s not only continuing work on the animation plug-in but has teamed up with Apple to make it a reality.

In an interview with Bloomberg at the Davos, Switzerland event, Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen describes development as a complicated two-way process rather than maintaining the previous image of a one-sided effort that would depend on App Store approval before it could launch.

“It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating,” he says. “The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.”

What hurdles Adobe has to overcome aren’t mentioned by the executive, though the company’s long porting process has underscored the difficulty involved. Narayen had said that he was “pleased with progress” as far back as June of last year — just three months after the iPhone SDK made native third-party apps an option on the touchscreen device.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has maintained since nearly a year ago that the real obstacle is the nature of Flash itself. While desktop Flash is too resource-heavy for the small processor and low memory of smartphones like the iPhone, Jobs has warned that Flash Lite is too feature-limited and doesn’t do many of the things users expect Flash to do — such as playing video on the web or showing complex animations on websites.

Most Flash Lite implementations actually depend on an app that runs entirely outside of the web browser and are often based on older versions of Flash that limit their performance and feature set; Jobs has argued for a “product in the middle” that does more.

Whether or not the collaborative process involves working on that app is very much a mystery, but it may be necessary for Flash to appear in Apple’s preferred form, as third-party iPhone apps aren’t allowed to serve as plugins based on the iPhone SDK’s guidelines.

And in the meantime, the cellphone maker has publicly advocated HTML 5 as a replacement and is collaborating with fellow browser developers Mozilla and Opera to perform many of the same functions of Flash but in a more universal and less resource-hungry standard.

(via AppleInsider.com)

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