Apple’s war on Flash just got more exciting, as big mobile players Nokia and Opera have publicly sided with Adobe.
Both of these companies hold a lot of weight in the mobile space, as Nokia is still the largest handset maker in the world by a wide margin and Opera’s mobile browsers are on millions of devices, including the iPhone. Both pledged to support Flash for its mobile browsing solutions.
“It is the only proprietary part of the web we support,” said Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner about Adobe’s web technology.
Nokia echoed those remarks and it’s starting to look like Apple may be the odd man out. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has said Flash is wrong for the iPhone OS because it is a resource hog, is not designed for touch interfaces and because it’s a closed, proprietary platform (the irony is probably not lost on Apple’s head honcho). Publishers and content makers are somewhat moving away from Adobe’s web technology in order to the reach the small, but potentially lucrative iPhone OS audience.
Adobe would still love to be on Apple’s mobile devices but it is taking a broader platform strategy. Flash will be on nearly every major smartphone soon enough and if it can condition users to expect the “full web” on their handsets, Apple may eventually be forced to adopt it. Android 2.2 will have support for this web technology and the early results haven’t been amazing. It works well, but it definitely does add to some of the loading times, which could be a problem. Check out our embedded video at the bottom of this post for a closer look at Flash running on Android 2.2.
It’s a reasonable debate with merit on both sides: Flash is a significant part of the web today but HTML5 is making strides and looks to be the web technology of the not-too-distant future. Give us your thoughts in the comments, readers.
[Via Reuters]