Flash on Android

This morning Adobe announced that the HTC Hero phone will be the first Android based phone to support Flash. Adrian Ludwig did a nice video showing off some of the features.

Its important to note that, while it is not explicitly said, this is in fact Flash Lite 3.1 running on the phone not a full version of Flash Player 10. Last week, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen did announce there will be a developer release of Flash Player 10 for mobile made available at the MAX conference in October.

Initial platforms that they want to target is smartphones running Symbian, webOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

This is all part of the Open Screen Project, which HTC has now also signed up to. The Open Screen Project is a collaborative effort between different hardware, software and distribution partners to bring a single unified platform across mobile, devices and desktop.

I think its worth setting expectations, while we might be moving towards a unified cross-device runtime that does not mean you will necessarily be able to just run anything you have on the desktop on any mobile device. I’m sure there will still be a need in many cases to optimize for different platforms.

A “developer release” as is scheduled in October will likely still be very rough around the edges. More likely 2010 will be the year where we’ll get the real breakthrough with Flash on mobile and devices.