Today Adobe has announced, that Flash Professional CS5 will have a capability of building native iPhone apps from Flash/AS3 source. It will even be possible to use Flex framework to build iPhone applications (what is however not recommended due to possible performance issues). More details can be found on Adobe Labs site.
Solution provided is unfortunately not the one everybody was looking for, but on the other hand Adobe confirms working on Flash Player 10 for iPhone. What’s good, is that we will finally have a full Flash (not a baby-Flash) on mobile device. I think, that there is much hope for decent performance (especially on iPhone 3Gs), because apps will be compiled natively for ARM uC. On the other hand there are some downsides of this way of running Flash on iPhone – with the biggest one – inability to run Flash apps directly from Safari and need to use AppStore to deliver our application to the client. I hope, that IPA compilation will be only the next step on the way to full Flash on iPhone and possibly other mobile devices.
