Yet companies are beading head over heel to make iPhone friendly versions of websites.

APPLE OWNS EVERYONE.

Yea, yea, I is fanboy blah, blah.

This blows... and I'm sure Adobe will just be jumping through hoops to get that little niche widget out real soon... I'm still fumming that the damned iTouch doesn't have a camera.

So were upset that a company demands better products to give to it's customers? Instead they should release totally incomplete versions with non functioning pieces? Isn't that called Microsoft?

I'm hoping the SDK will open things up enough to allow a developer to figure it out and bypass the Jobs altogether, save, save, save. There... now I have one more save than you in my first para, save one typo in yours "one isse".

@MBPro:
I'm right there with you MBPro. Fanboy all the way.

Let's hope that these rumors are wrong and we do get flash support.

Fanboy's unite!

My decision to not jump on the jesusphone bandwagon is looking better and better all the time.

Everyone on here who can't distinguish between the possessive and the plural needs to STFU. Thanks.

I bet this is an issue of royalties, not technology.

@arch05: I thought he was saying Fanboy is unite, as in all your base are belong to us.

This is a tough one. There's no way that the iphone is going with mobile flash. The whole point of Safari on the iphone is that it's a "real" internet. I doubt that was easy for Apple & getting Adobe on board to do a real flash that works on the iphone is tough.

The SDK won't help. Best case scenario it offers wide powerful support for applications. It will not support anything like system level components. Flash, begin a Safari plug-in to be used by various web sites will fall closer to "system component" than application.

I thank S. Jobs for forcing companies to raise the bar instead of accepting half baked apps. At lease Jobs does not accept mediocrity. This state of being is not acceptable to Apple and we should all be praising Jobs.

Apple has to feel the pressure from AT&T to keep Flash at bay. I mean, if the iphone supported flash video, think how much more bandwidth AT&T would have to support, especially since the iphone plans are all unlimited bandwidth.

My guess is that Apple is just stalling until they can hold out no longer, giving AT&T time to make sure they can handle the coming bandwidth load.

Jobs is correct... Flash Lite is too wimpy for the iPhone... it only supports Actionscript 2, which means that it will work with most content made with Flash 8 or earlier.

Considering that most new Flash apps that come out are now written for Flash 9, it would be silly for Adobe to port Flash Lite over to the iPhone. I also agree that the fully-fledged Flash 9 would probably chew through the iPhone's battery like a snake in a pickle barrel (kudos to whomever gets that reference).

Drunken discussions with Adobe employees have confirmed that something is in the works, and that they probably shouldn't have said anything.

@apt94jesse: Now that's just silly. Flash 9 supports H.264, which is exactly what the iPhone streams now when you watch YouTube.

Flash wasn't meant to be used to build UIs anyway. I welcome Flash being dropped as there's already platform-neutral ways of embedding video (MPEG for instance) and I grow tired of unlinkable websites that are nothing but a huge flash applet.

@FuzzysFriedChicken: Royalties? Do you think Apple wants Adobe to pay up to get Flash on the iPhone?

I can guarantee that Adobe isn't looking for money for making Flash for the iPhone. Flash is their gateway product, just like Acrobat... They make the money on server software (Flash Media Server, LiveCycle Data Services, ColdFusion) and other services, which encourage people to use Flash as the front-end UI.

Remember, the big selling point of flash is that it works identically across platforms and browsers.

Eh, Flash Lite sucks. Can't APPLE just get some code and make a version that would work with most video sites, ignore ad banners and cook me my breakfast? Is regular flash truly too unweildly to use on phones, or are we just more worried about how pathetic loading times are over EDGE?

I just want to watch Hulu on my iPod Touch...is that too much to ask for?

@Buran: Check out Adobe Flex and AIR. For that matter, also Google "Adobe Thermo". Flash is the new delivery platform for awesome UI experiences. Forget ads and YouTube embeds... we're talking world-class applications here.

*GASP* a critical view on Jobs and Apple on Gizmodo? I see the LIGHT! heh.

But yes. iPhone/iTouch needs flash support. I don't like not being able to show possible clients my website on the fly (though showing photos directly on the Touch is a bit easier anyways).

" Funny, Mobile Flash seems to work OK on all of the other phones that it's installed on."

• No, no it doesn't.

Plus, except for Scrabulous I haven't missed it at all. If flash were there the processor would work hard to render pages and the battery would due faster. Flash sucks on Mac OS X and it sucks on the ARM CPUS. Adobe is the issue here, not Apple, and I hope Adobe never come through.

@apt94jesse: I don't really think ATT has much say what goes on and off the iPhone. Remember that the iPhone is sold in other markets and if Apple had a different version of the phone for foreign markets that had cooler features due to ATT's complaints , people would scream bloody murder.

I'm definitely with John Gruber on this one. Apple makes this crazy little product called QuickTime, which used to be the defacto standard for video on the web. They have an opportunity to redefine that standard starting with the mobile web. Keeping Flash off of the iPhone is a pretty great way to go about doing that.

It's more likely that a 3rd party browser will be released which supports Flash...(think FireFox mobile)

@iotashan: Adobe is the one biggish company Apple might actually buy. But whatever happens, flash on the iPhone is just a matter of time.

This annoying little hangup prevents pretty much all video sites from working, save a tiny selection of YouTube videos

You obviously don't have an iPhone. As far as I can tell the conversion of all YouTube video to H264 is complete. I never have a problem accessing any YouTube videos on my iPhone.

Hm. NetFront 3.5 can support Flash. How'd that happen?

Maybe it is also about those annoying little Flash ads on every web page (I confess that have made some of those). Web surfing on Edge is already slooow, and adding a crap load of 30k downloads to the mix will destroying any enjoyment I have with the web on iPhone.

FlashLite - Adobe's Mobile Flash platform is very very limited compared to the real Flash Player. Using it on the iPhone would still mean most Flash content probably including a lot of the major video sites would not work correctly.

Flash Player 9 is a performance hog. It can barely eek out an acceptable frame rate rendering a small number of objects/behaviors on a full blown bleeding edge desktop let alone on a slow-ish handset. The player has very little support for hardware acceleration (it is just now adding a glitchy and somewhat slow version of video acceleration for fullscreen video, does not support hardware 3d cards that most desktops have, and certainly doesn't have rendering code designed to speed up sprite rendering by leveraging hardware). Try comparing a Flash9 "papervision 3d" experience (nice but may as well be an old Playstation 1 game c.1997), to a modern game on the same computer, for example.

A while back Sony CLIE handsets had a custom Sony-only build of the 'real' Flash Player (well, it was about a generation back from the then current version for the web). From what I recall Sony built this port in house, licensing the Flash Player code (not the other way around).

For Adobe to make a custom Flash Player for iPhone that really worked at an acceptable level they would need to do something they've barely begun to do with the web player: they would need to redevelop the player ground up to really use everything it can of the hardware it is sitting on. It is probably unreasonable to believe they will do this for the iPhone when they don't even do this with their desktop player/plugin.

Apple seems to be embracing the trend of websites to go AJAX and focus on JavaScript and tricky HTML interfaces. The performance of AJAX applications on the iPhone isn't too bad, but still needs to be optimized for iPhone like any other site would need to be (like facebook, etc.) to make an ideal experience. Apple's own sites do not use Flash, but use a nice blend of AJAX and Quicktime to deliver content (take a look at the new .mac gallery for example).

Are long comments a faux pas? Oops...

well, since most of the owner of iPhones are "elites" it seems obvious that all the websites are doing a "iphone friendly version" of their page. i mean, the mighty CEO wants to show his friends how awesome is his/her new toy "look ma! my webthingy on my iphone! cool!!"

Ya, I am sure your hurting as a consumer by not having Flash, Adam. Give me a break.

DIE FLASH, DIE. There, I said it. Oh, Flash is cute and all, but COME ON.

Jobso is no fool- Flash is a defacto standard on the desktop, but there is no dominant mobile standard yet. Why should he hand that kind of power to Adobe? Why, I fully expect to see Apple release a super-Dashboard environment for the iPhone, that adds some graphics API calls to Javascript. They'll release the API headers as an open spec, and try and topple Flash from the mobile side.

@Zakintosh

You hit the nail on the head (or Gruber did).

My personal taste: I don't like Flash websites at all so I am kind of glad that they won't be gunking up my iPhone anytime soon.

I think Gizmodo completely missed Apple/Jobs' position - Apple doesn't want Adobe to create a "Goldilocks-esque middle version" of Flash but rather for the mobile web to embrace quicktime instead of Flash.

I swear if Jobs said mud was great to eat with toast, most of you would make reasons to agree with that.

Bring flash to mobile OSX. Nokia have done it successfully with S60 and Maemo, and others are are following suit. Its not all about youtube.

Create plugins to block out ads and other malicious content if you must, but don't stifle the fun of the web and say its a pointless endeavour to include such a widely used web standard.

We can only hope.

Damn, it disgusts me to see what some of you say and how blindly you agree without a shade of grey. well, free speech and all that. I just pray its the minority.

I can't wait for Mobile Firefox to be released with the new SDK. The three biggest items on my wishlist are:
-Saved/Auto-complete Passwords
-Select text and google search/definition/etc
-Mobile Flash compatible

Say goodbye to Safari if they can keep the browsing experience the same otherwise...

@WilCon: Why should Adobe eat the cost of developing a version of flash for the iPhone? Maybe if Apple offered to share the cost, but I doubt that would happen.

my guess is jobs doesn't really care about how well mobile flash works. He's just a total control freak and wants everybody to have to look to him for all of life's electronic answers.

Flash on the iphone? No. Its about Flash on the internet. If you're going to offer "the real internet" then damnit, its gotta have flash. Or movie watching. or Java. These things are not optional if you want "the real internet" and not "the kiddie pool" version.

Flash, this. Flash, that.

My Treo can't even render HTML properly, you ungrateful bastards.

Even the PSP can do Flash!

@RobotVampire: Adobe developing it makes sense because it increases the number of people using Flash.

Flash works fine on the Nokia Nxx series (e.g. N810). For example YouTube works with pretty good framerates without any special "mobile version" of the website. So much for the superriority of OS X when it comes to performance or capabilities. But yes, the UI on the iPhone is very pretty!!

F*ckin Jobs.

Why do you people want flash so bad? Think about it-- the primary uses of flash are:

1. Bloated as a mofo flash based web designs -- The last thing I want to see on my mobile browser (or any browser for that matter) is a friggen 28 loading animation.

2. flash video modules -- H.264, mpeg, avi, wmv...there are too many formats to name that work just as well for video as a flash video

3. animated ads -- nuff said

Great goin stevey!!....(@sshole!)

I like mobile Safari the way it is. It disables all the annoying shit on Myspace.

Adam Frucci, I think you need to hop down off your high horse. It appears Apple has some justifiably sound reasoning behind its omission of Flash from the iPhone.

"Funny, Mobile Flash seems to work OK on all of the other phones that it's installed on. I'm sure we could make do with it on the precious iPhone."

Adam, regarding Flash Lite; this isn't what I've been reading around the web (as well as some of the posts above).

I usually don't get irritated by what I read on Gizmodo. But it really sounds like you've got an axe to grind. Maybe you should be grinding that axe somewhere else?

It's the real Internet... without Flash!

LOL!