Adobe Systems and ARM announced a technology collaboration that will optimize and enable Adobe Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR from ARM Powered devices like Apple’s iPhone. ARM Powered devices range from mobile phones to set-top boxes, mobile Internet devices, TVs, automotive platforms, personal MP3s and other mobile computing devices. The collaboration is expected to accelerate mobile graphics and video capabilities on the ARM platform in order to bring rich Internet applications and Web services to mobile devices and consumer electronics worldwide. The optimization is targeted for ARMv6 and ARMv7 architectures used in the ARM11 family and it will probably be available in the second half of 2009.

Today, mobile device processors, including the iPhone’s, are not fast enough to handle most Flash-laden sites. Flash Lite, the scaled down standard designed specifically for mobile devices is not yet widely used, as most mobiles are too slow even for this kind of software. However, in mid-June, Adobe’s CEO told the media that the company has Flash running on an iPhone emulator, but Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs also mentioned that the Flash technology will not be coming to the iPhone anytime soon. He said that the full version of Flash would perform poorly on the iPhone, and that Flash Lite isn’t the spirit of iPhone’s full internet experience.

Anyway, looking closely at the problem, we can clearly see why Apple does not want Flash on its iPhone. Flash is a software platform and Apple likes to maintain complete control over the applications running on its hardware. By allowing Flash onto the iPhone, Apple will most clearly open doors to someone else’s development platform and Flash will give developers a new opportunity to place their software on the iPhone. Therefore, this could divert business from the AppStore, allowing the distribution of music, movies and videos that would be capable of competing with those on iTunes.