I recently interviewed the team that was principally behind the development of Adobe Flash Lite for mobile who quickly saw that Adobe could not keep up with the fast paced developments in mobile.
Carlos Icaza, Walter Luh, Eric Herrmann & Evan Kirchhoff all left Adobe from what they perceived as excessive bureaucracy and an overall lack of vision on the mobile front to start Ansca Mobile.
Carlos Icaza managed & Walter Luh led the Adobe Flash Lite engineering team as they feel in the end that Flash will ONLY work effectively on Android 2.2 devices & beyond – with only limited Flash use, if at all, on all versions prior.
They point to the chronic delays in Flash being fully available on Android & mobile devices as a whole due to the fact that Adobe was too bogged down in trying to support everything and anything with its “write once deploy everywhere” strategy (i.e.: the Open Screen Project).
Flash Lite was a mobile subset of Flash, and Adobe — instead of focusing its efforts into making the right product for the iPhone or Android — decided to stubbornly write their own version which resulted in a slow and heavy product.
They feel Flash will be around as long as there will be alternatives to the iPhone such as Android and other mobile devices such as Palm and Nokia, but it is not the panacea.
There are many reasons why Flash will still underperform and be heavy in terms of size as its good for playing Flash content, but not for native apps
A simple demo of a “Hello World” app witnessed at 360iDev came in at 8MB on an iPhone device – contrast that to a Ansca Mobile Corona “Hello World” app which was roughly about ~400KB.
Over at Mobile Martin I go over the Ansca Mobile Corona solution for Flash mobile applications & game development as well their easy one click porting of your Android app to the iPhone / iPad & vice versa.
