MWC: Adobe outlines Air, Flash 10.1 mobile plans

Adobe Systems (NASDAQ:ADBE) is making progress in its plans to infiltrate as many mobile phones as possible. It used the Mobile World Congress show this week to outline its plans for Flash 10.1, as well as to introduce a related platform, Adobe Air, or Adobe Integrated Runtime, which will be available on Android within the year.

Adobe Air was born from the Open Source Project, an industry-wide initiative that has grown to include 70 members, including new member Symbian. As a runtime for standalone apps, Air will give developers a way to build apps outside the mobile browser and across multiple operating systems. Air draws on features from Flash Player 10.1 to take advantage of the phone’s native capabilities. The New York Times Reader is an example of an Air app, as is Twitter browser TweetDeck.

Air will use Flash Player 1.0, which Adobe recently made available in a beta version, for content providers and mobile developers. General availability is slated for the first half of the year. The 10.1 version is the first consistent run-time release of the Open Screen Project for Web browsing and high-definition videos across any screen, including netbooks, smartbooks, desktops and consumer electronics.

Adobe’s overarching goal is to help designers and developers building Web apps get them into the hands of consumers with a compelling and connected experience, said Adrian Ludwig, group product marketing manager of the Flash platformat Adobe. Air is flexible enough to allow for standalone, installable Web apps that act as local data independent of the Internet – a different experience than browser-based apps.

Ludwig said this also offers flexibility in business models by allowing consumers to purchase an app and allowing developers to run apps across multiple devices. Air was adapted for mobile devices to include support for multi-touch interfaces, gesture inputs, accelerometers for motion and device orientation and geo-location for detecting position

“For Android, RIM and BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, all these other platforms, our goal is to allow the same apps to run across all devices,” Ludwig said. “Developers definitely wanted the ability to get on the app store. They’ve been really happy with it. I’m seeing among the strongest announcements in terms of developer feedback I’ve seen.”

At launch, Air will be supported by Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile.

Adobe also announced this week that it has joined the LiMo Foundation, meaning that Linux Mobile-based mobile phones will soon support Flash as well. Adobe joined the LiMo Foundation, because its non-profit status precluded it from joining the Open Screen Project, but the implications are the same, Ludwig said.

Flash has long been the desktop leader with 75% of all Web videos running on Flash, according to comScore, but now more than 1.2 billion mobile phones are Flash capable as well. While its mobile expansion is impressive, Apple is one company it hasn’t been able to win over. Apple exercised its proprietary grasp on the iPhone and new iPad to keep Adobe out, for fear it would grow Adobe’s developer base at the expense of its own. The iPhone-owner still hasn’t come around on allowing Adobe on board, but the company has found otherwise to get Flash on the iPhone. It developed a Flash Player iPhone app last October and is working on finalizing Air for the next generation of Flash professional, Ludwig said.

BLUESTREAK BRINGS FLASH TO EMBEDDED DEVICES

Following Apple’s rejection of Adobe on the iPhone and iPad, second-largest Flash provider Bluestreak Technology has swooped in, signing up new customers in the embedded devices space. The company works with customers like Time Warner Cable, Videotron, Orange Group and Qualcomm’s FLO TV and is deployed on most set-top box suppliers and in 150 different models of cell phones across all the major operating systems. CEO Dominique Jodoin said that what sets Bluestreak apart from Adobe is that Adobe is primarily a tools company for which the Flash engine is only a small part of their business. Bluestreak’s business model relies on using the specs from Adobe, but innovating around that depending on their customers’ needs.

“We started from an embedded environment,” Jodoin said. “The set-top box is very difficult environment to work with – very slow processor with very limited memory. That’s how we built our engine. Adobe started from the other end of the scale. They started on the desktop and gradually moved into the embedded space. We are meeting in the middle, but since then we have taken the lion’s share of the market in set-top boxes.”

The company recently teamed up with security company SafeNet to secure DRM-protected mobile content running on the Flash engine. At MWC, the company also announced a partnership with CellFish to produce interactive mobile avatars for consumers to personalize their home screens.

While Adobe and Bluestreak fight for market share, Flash-competitor HTML5 is gearing up to replace Flash for a lot of mobile features. Google Voice and YouTube have joined Apple in moving away from Flash, using the latest version of open-source HTML. The new version, HTML5 lets developers build standards-based Web apps that run like native apps in the mobile browser.

While developers often most choose between Flash and HTML (essentially between Apple or the rest of the market), Ludwig said that Flash is not in conflict with HTML or HTML5 as it provides tooling for them as well. Flash was born out of HTML’s inability to innovate as much as developer’s wanted, he said. Now, Adobe is working with developers to incorporate HTML with their Flash platforms.

“We are using Flash because transparency is not something that HTML provides,” Ludwig said. “We expect them to continue to interoperate like that going into the future. The general operating assumption is that you do one or the other, but that’s not how people do web development. Most sites have some Flash and some HTML.”