Flash Mobile to Support Multi-touch and Accelerometer

Adobe produces two different Flash players, one for the desktop (its likely you've experienced that one browsing the web) and one for mobile. The mobile platform is a lighter weight version and doesn't have as many features but as mobile phones become a primary platform for surfing the web mobile Flash is becoming more and more important.

The desktop version of the Flash player is an excellent platform for developing large screen mulit-touch applications and is used in combination with multi-touch open source frameworks like tBeta and Touchlib. I've blogged about the importance of the Flash desktop version supporting multitouch before and I'm still waiting to find out when the desktop version of Flash will include an Adobe supported API for multi-touch.

In the mean time Kevin Lynch, CEO of Adobe, has announced that multi-touch as well as accelerometer support will be released in a beta version of Flash Mobile by the end of 2009. Thanks to Ryan Stewart for the heads up!

Support for multi-touch and accelerometer will do a lot to put other mobile operating system vendors on better footing to complete with Apple's iPhone. The iPhone has never supported Flash and according to Jobs it never will - that might change but for now you cannot view Flash content when browsing the web with your iPhone. That's a major drawback for the iPhone as there is a lot of Flash content out there - especially video content.

Job's reasoning for not supporting Flash is pretty obvious to me. Right now Apple has unilateral control over the development of resident iPhone applications which must be approved by Apple and deployed through the AppStore in order to be distributed. While you can develop some nice iPhone web applications without having to go through the Apple AppStore, the native SDK for the iPhone is much more powerful.

If Apple supported Flash on the iPhone it would be much easier to develop robust applications for the iPhone accessible over the web without the need of the Apple approval process and AppStore. Job's doesn't want that as it could substantially reduce control over iPhone development and Apple's revenues (they get 30% of the revenue of all iPhone applications available from AppStore). So for now, at least, Apple doesn't support Flash on the iPhone which is something that other smart phones will be able to support once multi-touch support for Flash mobile is in final release.