Steve Jobs: Adobe Flash Will Not Be Supported By iPhone Anytime Soon

If you're enjoying watching the latest Flash videos on your iPhone, don't expect it anytime soon. On the shareholder meeting Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, that Adobe Flash will not be supported by iPhone anytime soon.

Steve Jobs claimed that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful."

"There's this missing product in the middle. It just doesn't exist. Flash Lite is not capable of being used with the Web," declared Steve Jobs.

He said that the cause for that was Flash’s architectural limitation. This due to the fact that Flash was designed for PC, which has huge computing power. IPhone on the other hand has much less powerful CPU, memory, disk storage and battery.

Despite of Jobs announcement he insisted that Apple maintains a good relationship with Adobe all the same.

Flash on the iPhone:

Less technically inclined pundits have expected Apple to release a Flash plugin for the iPhone that works identically to the plugin used on desktop computers, similar to how the iPhone supports viewing PDF documents or Microsoft Word and Excel files. The problem is that the Flash runtime has never been designed to work on anything outside of a desktop computer, which has almost unlimited access to processing power and few constraints on battery use, available RAM, or heat dissipation.

The iPhone is a very different product. It's a fraction of the size of a laptop battery and uses a low power, embedded ARM processor that works unlike the Intel Core or PowerPC processors used in Macs and PCs that can run Flash. In order to develop a Flash plugin for the iPhone, Adobe's proprietary software would need to be recompiled and optimized for the ARM architecture, which isn't something Apple could easily do independent of Adobe.

Of course, some folks are likely to be more than disappointed with this announcement, some of them simply relieved that iPhones will remain clear of Flash's clutches, while others don’t even worry and think that there is no need of flashplayer on the iPhone as they will use computer if necessary.

References: AppleInder.com and ComputerWorld.com