Holy hand grenade of Adobe?

Aaron Franco published a very interesting piece today about Flash, and how it can be the Holy Grail for mobile app developers.

As well as some heated thoughts around Apple’s refusal to include Flash on the iPhone, but allow it on the iPad, he made the point that maybe Flash is the panacea that will allow mobile applications companies and developers to produce a build-once-deploy-anywhere application. Truly, the Holy Grail in our mobile world.

In fact, I would argue that this may well be the new battleground in the mobile world.

I agree that Flash has the potential to work well in mobile as an application front end, in that it has two core strengths. Firstly, it offers a uniform platform for developing, and secondly, vector graphics allow for multiple screen sizes to be supported.

However, on it’s own it will fail because it will always need a ‘reader’ application, which will have to be installed on the device. That this application will then have to be modified to work for each device (and the supported APIs for things like location) means that it will be a slow process to implement, even if there is support from most handset manufacturers. It will also mean that differing devices will support Flash in differing ways, much like J2ME is supported today. Ultimately it will be fragmented, and cause designers and developers huge headaches to implement for.

Ultimately, I believe Flash should be seen as a sophisticated presentation layer that can sit over the top of another web-centric, standards based platform implementation – the widget platform.

This is already on most devices (not just Windows 7 – the winner of the We Love Mobile Worst Stand Experience award at MWC 2010), and with W3C and OMTP providing a good standards base, allows for a clearly understood top end and degraded experience paths.

It is a shame that it is not currently covered, but again, I believe that it is much easier for this technology to be upgraded than for a whole new platform to be installed across all devices.

So, a Flash based application working off a web based platform? Maybe one web is the way to go..