Adobe recently went from near irrelevant in mobile marketing to king-of-the-hill. While Flash has taken online rich media by storm, a few months ago it was barely supported on any mobile handsets, and for the few which did claim Flash support, it was an incarnation that was bordering on painful. How quickly things can change in today’s mobile market.
The big news has been the addition of iPhone and iPod Touch-compatible file export from Flash Professional CS5. Flash developers can take existing or new Flash assets and use those to create iPhone apps with minimal optimization, and no knowledge of Objective C (which is what iPhone apps are written in). For creative agencies (and the media agencies trying to get those creative agencies to support an iPhone app) this is great news.
Supporting the iPhone and iPod Touch with the brilliant functionality planned for the Web is no longer a separate, onerous task. It is now just minor tweaks at the end of the development process, and doesn’t require custom, out-of-house developers to achieve.
It’s true that this only applies to the 45+ million iPhone or iPod Touch units out there, but there’s another announcement cementing Adobe as the friend of the mobile developer’s. Flash Player 10.1 will see cross-platform support, working on almost all of the non-Apple smartphone devices, in addition to Macs, PCs, and Linux machines.
Already flash apps are being ported to the AppStore, and by the middle of next year, nearly all smartphone devices will be supporting Flash assets in some manner. For digital marketers looking to push into mobile, but without the allocated budgets for creative production across mobile devices, Adobe looks to have saved the day.
