I’ve had it up to here with listening to everyone complaining about how the iPhone doesn’t support Adobe’s Flash.  People are either hyping the future of Flash or proposing outlandish solutions that don’t really work.  The fact is, there are substantial reasons why Adobe Flash doesn't get embedded into many phones. Instead of demanding that Adobe puts Flash on iPhones, people should wonder why it has been so difficult. I followed the saga of Flash on mobile since 2003, often experimented with it, and would like to share some findings. The Problems with Flash on Mobile

• It is high in CPU use, which is a problem on many levels for a mobile phone.  It is likely to deliver a sub-standard experience on a phone since vector graphics are complex calculations
• With Flash (a veritable resource hog) on board, the phone or app will crash more frequently
• Flash on mobile in the US has a tarnished reputation.  Not that this can’t be overcome but Verizon’s deal with Adobe FlashCast was a famous failure.  Crisp has first hand experience working on a FlashCast app with Verizon in 2007 and it was a nightmare.
• Flash Lite (v1 to v3) had many developers with high expectations fooled.  In truth, Flash Lite technology for phones is rather simple and useless.
• Embedding Flash as a plug-in in a browser creates all sorts of complications. QuickTime isn’t even running within a web page on iPhone Safari. QuickTime launches as a separate app.

The Future for Flash on Mobile

• Adobe is hard at work creating enough improvements to the technology to make it work better for phones. Only then will manufacturers and operators find it worthwhile to license it.  It would be logical to expect to see some results early 2010 as announced this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
• I’m convinced that it is not due to lack of will that Adobe requires time to do this.  Optimization of this complex graphical application often depends on use of low-level system API’s which might not be accessible.  These interdependencies take time to resolve.
• While Adobe will provide several popular mobile software platforms with embedded Flash capabilities in the future, expect that iPhone and Blackberry will be the last ones.  Apple has QuickTime and they are expected to drag their feet on working with Adobe to support Flash. Blackberry being a Java device for the enterprise would probably have problems providing the low-level OS access.  The first movers will be Android, Palm Pre, Windows Phone or Symbian.
• But Flash for the web and Flash on mobile will still be two different things entirely. Don't expect a regular Flash animation for web to be fully compatible with mobile Flash.  Which means, don’t expect your Flash-based ads or web pages to render on mobile devices seamlessly.  You will still need to optimize for mobile.

What to Do About it Today There are companies out there today who have announced ways to “fake Flash” or provide technology work-arounds for a Flash-like experience.  It surprises me that there are so few mobile sites taking advantage of the viable alternative that is SVG, a scalable vector based graphics library that is embedded in a remarkable number of browsers.  SVG is expected to be more broadly available in mobile browsers soon. Just like HTML 5 and SMIL, it is part of the list of technologies that within few years will be all the rage here at Crisp since it will be more broadly supported by phones and support the needs of mobile advertisers. I have well founded hopes for flashy and cool animations on the mobile web and SVG is the first to provide a technically workable solution, but let's put our web embedded Flash hopes to bed for a little while.  Until Adobe puts better solutions on the market, ad networks and agencies may look to repurpose regular Flash ads in mobile as an interim solution.  Serving Flash-like ads within an iPhone application has potential but then you are limiting your audience. In the interim, here at Crisp we have found a few work arounds of our own.  First, while agencies and brands may say they want Flash, what they really want is an engaging consumer experience.  We can accomplish this with a variety of rich media ad units including IAB standard 300x250 ad units used as full screen takeovers or interstitials, Javascript-enabled rotating banners, banner expansion units with tap-to-video within the ad itself.  As mobile experts, we continue to innovate rich media mobile ad solutions that capture the audience’s attention and provide multiple avenues of response to drive interaction and brand engagement and recall.

The increased investment in iPhone applications by media and entertainment companies last year helped the mobile industry move forward quickly.  The innovations that came with the more than 30,000 iPhone and iPod apps have most definitely attracted many new mobile content consumers.  So what’s next?  Are we about to see Apple dominate the mobile content world by leveraging the most successful mobile content ecosystem forever? How does any mobile device provide access to the broadest array of high quality content quickly?  How does the mobile user share information with friends instantly? How do users of computers, mobile devices and entertainment consoles all share the information on the Internet to make their lives easier and more interesting?  The answer to all these questions:  the web browser. I didn’t like the mobile operator paid content ecosystems for ringtones and games and didn’t like the walled gardens of early mobile internet.  So naturally the iPhone app store is nothing new from that perspective. It is great for the app publishers at first because it provides a manageable distribution channel. But the much repeated history of this  type of mobile content distribution is a mobile marketing nightmare. It has taken a while but we’re now at the dawn of what could become the most significant technical evolution mobile devices have seen.  It is WebOS, Webkit with SQLLite, GEARS, Safari, and Opera Mobile.  This hodge-podge of terms and brands has been around for awhile and are indeed the future-- even though they aren't known under any one brand.  What all these products have in common is that they are all working towards converging into a RIA (Rich Internet Application) standard, HTML 5.  Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Apple, Google and several others seem to be committed to supporting the HTML 5 standard which will make mobile web applications a lot more capable and significantly faster.  A good example is Google who re-launched Gmail on iPhones with HTML5 capability. The drawbacks of the typical web browser on mobile devices is that they don’t work without a network connection, they don’t provide persistent storage, and they don’t tie into the device’s APIs well.  The next generation of mobile devices is about to fix that with HTML 5.  It will be a step towards platform independence of the advanced mobile web application and will narrow the feature gap between the downloadable application (like those in the iTunes App Store) and web applications which are generally accessible for free via the mobile web browser.   Content publishers can make great mobile application functionality available outside of a closed ecosystem and with the scalable advertisement supported business model as a recurring revenue opportunity.

The following also recently appeared on Mobile Marketer... When the iPhone came out, it quickly became the greatest force in creating a mobile media market. The progression was that first Apple advertised the full web on your phone; then it introduced the first scalable applications platform through the iTunes app store. The progression of mobile content usage on the iPhone does not have an as well-written history. What we have are good stats from AdMob about ad requests from the mobile web, and now a great study by Pinch Media about the downloading and usage of iPhone applications.

First Came iPhone Sites Once publishers realized that the full web on your phone wasn’t an ideal experience, they began searching for a better solution.  First, there were iPhone optimized sites – Fandango, CNN, ESPN, USA Today and others.  Some use Apple’s framework, some have strayed, but all offer a level of optimization for the WebKit browser that blows away what could be done on Blackberries, Windows Mobile phones, and other smartphones. Now, we have new developments in mobile web, like HTML 5, which will enable location in the browser, picture uploads, offline content caching and more. However, with the market’s focus on iPhone apps and the downturn in the economy, it is unlikely that the pendulum will swing back to the mobile web in the foreseeable future without a big TV spend from Apple.  So those developments will go largely unnoticed until people start seeing stats again that show the mobile web surging ahead in usage.  What people forget is that while iPhone apps are sexy, mobile sites are ultimately more discoverable through site redirects and ultimately, mobile search.

Then Came iPhone Apps Greg Yardley, CEO of Pinch Media, did a great service to both the application development and mobile web industry by putting out this honest look at the state of uptake and usage for iPhone applications. Here’s what Greg said based on the 30 million downloads using their analytics:

• There’s a 24 hour downloading window, so you’d better make a top 100, 25, or 10 list in that time
• Over time it has gotten more difficult to get noticed – 2x as hard as 6 months ago to get in the top 25, and 5x as hard to get in the top 100 as 6 months ago
• The app store is designed to maximize turnover, remember the problem with getting good placement on carrier decks? This is worse, because you don’t stay in the top lists for long

Can you Have the Best of Both Worlds? The fact is, apps offer speed and navigation that mobile web currently cannot.  Not to mention the sex appeal that gets your bosses excited.  But if they are hard to monetize, hard to find, and have a limited shelf life, are they good enough by themselves? A mobile site offers infinitely more in terms of discoverability, monetization, and current content that doesn’t depend on app upgrades, so why not have both? The cost of deploying a mobile website is also much less than an iPhone application and it will immediately work on all phones. Having the best of both worlds is not difficult. If you don’t have a mobile site – get one!

• Publishers - Not to worry, if you have RSS, XML, or ATOM feeds Crisp Wireless and others can get your content up quickly
• Brands – Not to worry, Crisp can also help you mobilize your content so you can advertise on mobile effectively
• Retailers – If you’re looking to enable commerce, companies like Usablenet can build mobile storefronts so that you can drive people within apps or in the mobile browser to locate your store or even buy your products – no API or RSS integration necessary
• Make sure you work with your app developer to  insert links to your mobile site from within your app

Have a mobile site – promote it!

• Enable sharing features – email to a friend, SMS to a friend, save to a social network to direct to mobile web links
• Make sure that sharing from your iPhone app uses mobile web links, not desktop links
• Put a link on your mobile website to advertise that you have an iPhone application
• Put mobile links everywhere – print, online, Twitter feeds, emails

[Note:  Why would a brand or publisher need to put mobile web links into Apps, on social networks and emails?  It's called SEO.  Did you realize that the content from your iPhone application does not show up in the major search engines for mobile?] Here’s more of what Greg from Pinch Media revealed about the nature of iPhone app usage:

• Of those apps with 1-3MM unique users their repeat usage went from 30% down 5% in the first 30 days, and down to 1% in 90 days
• Sports does the best at keeping users during the first 30 days, but Entertainment keeps users best over time
• Overall, most apps should be paid rather than free because it is hard to make back your development costs through advertising when you only have an average of 80 sessions to recoup your investment

Can you have the best of both worlds? Sure. It doesn't matter if you charge for your apps or give them away for free, the trend in apps without promotion is to decrease over time, but mobile web usage is increasing over time. What's the best way to monetize your investment over time? How will you improve your discoverability? Keep your content fresh? Drive traffic to your app? If you're going to have a successful iPhone app, you might as well have mobile web in place to promote it. Publishers who ignore their mobile web sites and continue to merely play with shiny apps will soon realize that if they don't leverage the power of the mobile web, they'll only be playing with themselves.