http://www.anscamobile.com/about/founders/

I look forward to installing Flash player on my Droid whenever I finally can, but I’ve already been working with mobile Flash since the days of Flash 5 on PocketPC. Here are my personal predictions, not based on any inside information:

* What we currently call the “Flash platform” is actually a bundle of unrelated use cases that evolved to solve problems on the desktop, and my guess is that mobile will peel those cases apart again. For example, H.264 decoding is now standard phone hardware, so a good way to handle smartphone video is the way that iPhone and Android currently handle YouTube: show the embedded thumbnail, then launch the fullscreen native player. A Flash player doesn’t really add anything here.

* Rich ad banners and navigation have been another important use of Flash on the desktop, but I think Flash 10 on mobile is overkill for the simple task of animating a banner or a navbar — and mobile WebKit already supports keyframe-based animation in CSS with tweens, easing, and 3D transforms. I definitely wouldn’t write a game in CSS, but it should be good enough for advertising. (Of course, someone still needs to write a good animation tool for CSS; we’ll see whether Adobe or Apple gets to it first!)

* That leaves games and apps, for which I think Adobe is doing the right thing on iPhone and Android: get the player out of the way and write a cross-compiler for Flash source code. Why would you want to run something in a browser plugin, when you could run it as an application instead? But getting this to work well is a difficult engineering problem, and we won’t know how it performs in real life until they release CS5 to the public.

* Also, speaking as a longtime mobile Flash developer, the App Store is a MUCH better way of making money than any previous indie opportunity on mobile. Apple’s 30% cut is an amazingly good deal: the mobile carriers used to take 50% off the top, and then you’d split the rest with a publisher, since carriers would never deal directly with indie developers. And then you had to negotiate separate deals with one carrier at a time, while Apple wraps the entire world into one interface AND takes care of all the local tax issues. Carriers used to make you pay really high testing fees (on Verizon, this was around $10,000 per Flash Lite game to get BREW certification), while Apple does testing for free. Carriers would take months to pay royalties, Apple takes 45 days. Carriers accepted a handful of titles per month and had a terrible store interface that their customers hated, Apple accepts tens of thousands of titles per month and their store has actual screenshots and reviews. Etc, etc. I understand people’s complaints about Apple, but honestly, you have no idea what it was like in the old days before iPhone!

* In short, the web plugin seems like the least interesting use of Flash on mobile, and apps are where the real action is. But in either case, the idea of using Flash authoring to deploy the “same content” on desktop and mobile has never made a lot of sense — this isn’t related to Flash, it’s just not a good design idea. So ultimately, I view the phrase “Flash platform” as marketing-speak for “using mostly similar Flash authoring skills and shared assets to deploy some of the same content in different applications”. But it sounds a lot less snappy when you put it that way

Tablet example:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1792

Mobile Example:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1758

Flash in a Mobile Browser:
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1781

Mind you these are early examples. As the Flash Player 10.1 and Flash CS5 leave beta I am certain we will see more and more examples of the Flash Platform running great in mobile devices.

I think the question will be, once Flash clearly proves that it can run well in the mobile platform, will the Apple devices let go of their monatization deathgrip? Worthy of note: When Flash proves to work on those devices, Adobe won’t be forcing people to use their technology to create apps (the way Apple does now) so suddenly we will all be looking at Apple and say, “hey, what gives?” as we watch Steve Jobs running away with pockets full of his 30% cut!

Another prediction: PCs often cost a lot less than say the macbook pro and iMac I own. The cost has been prohibitive enough to keep the PC a huge leader over the mac forever. If the iPhone proves to be inferior (meaning other mobile devices, tablets or phones, can run more plugins and run them fine) will people feel the same way about the Apple mobile devices? Will apple’s only defense be “Well, maintaining control means ensuring a wonderful experience,” even though they are ignoring and neglecting the “wonderful experience” people are having on other mobile devices that are less restrictive?

Clearly, this is really about Apple wanting monetize the App Store for as long as it can. Once all of the other devices (hand held or tablet) prove they can run Flash, then everyone (including me, I have an iPhone) will make the switch away from an inferior device.

Two corrections:

VideographyLab and Franke Sinks UK happen to be wrong. Adobe no longer charges vendors to sell their devices with Flash Player included. They did. They haven’t for a while now.

ObamaPacman makes a good point but who is to blame. I own mac computers too, and I can remember when people would talk about their Windows computers and brag about how well they would run before people put software on them. Then people would complain about bloat-ware, blah blah blah. In the case of OSX you are looking at a different beast than the mobile Mac OS. For example, ever since Flash went Intel and the systems began running with NVIDIA cards it became a lot more simple to boost the visual performance of apps via hardware acceleration. In the iPhone they limit access to certain APIs that would specifically benefit the Flash Player. Adobe has recently gotten very vocal about the fact that Apple is making choices that hold back any alternative development effort. So, yes, maybe their are performance issues. But maybe it isn’t enough to keep Flash off the device and maybe Apple is playing a roll in creating the performance issue.

It is like entering the automobile industry late (which Adobe has… Flash has been mobile for longer than Apple has cared about the iPhone or the failed Newton device) and then creating uniquely goofy cars than run sideways on unique roads and then acting like it is everyone else’s fault that the other cars can run on those roads with those goofy cars. It is their prerogative to make that decisions (new cars and new roads) but in the end, it will be seen as amazingly proprietary and limiting, not inevitably innovative. In the end Apple created a very specific road and you have to build cars like them, screw the rest of the web. That isn’t very forward thinking. Apple is the bottleneck (reminder… I own an iPhone and Mac computers, so this isn’t an anti-Mac flamewar comment. I have been building the web for 10 years.)