Mike Chambers is Adobe’s principal product manager for the Flash platform. After having complained about the aggressive attitude of Apple in refusing to allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad he had this to say about Android :

Fortunately, the iPhone isn’t the only game in town. Android based phones have been doing well behind the success of the Motorola Droid and Nexus One, and there are a number of Android based tablets slated to be released this year. We are working closely with Google to bring both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 to these devices, and thus far, the results have been very promising.

Because this is Flash, it is rather trivial to port games created with Flash that target the iPhone to target other operating systems, such as Android. At FlashCamp San Francisco on Friday night, David Wadhwani (GM and VP of the Flash Platform) showed off a number of games running on Android that had been created with Flash, many of which had already been deployed as iPhone games. My personal favorites were Chroma Circuit and GridShock created by Josh Tynjala of Bowler Hat Games. Both games were originally developed as browser based games and were then updated to target the iPhone (Chroma Circuit was featured on the iTunes app store). Josh recently updated and optimized them to target Flash Player on Android, and the results have been impressive. There have already been a couple of developers who have moved their Flash based content from the iPhone to Flash on Android (couple of examples below) and I expect that this is a trend we will be seeing more and more of.

Here are some links to developers who originally targeted the iPhone with their Flash content and are now deploying to Android:

* Adobe AIR for Android: Chroma Circuit and Qrossfire Videos
* Jobe Makar : Flash is Speedy on Android
* Jobe Makar’s Fruit Smash Organic (Video)
* Alan Queen’s Star Map Game (Video)

Both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 for Android are in pre-release testing. If you are interested in being notified when we expand the testing, you can sign up at:

* Flash Player 10.1 for Android Beta
* Adobe AIR 2.0 for Android Beta

Personally, I am going to shift all of my mobile focus from iPhone to Android based devices (I am particularly interested in the Android based tablets coming out this year) and not focus on the iPhone stuff as much anymore. This includes both Flash based, and Objective-C based iPhone development. While I actually enjoy working in Objective-C, I don’t have any current plans to update and / or maintain my existing native iPhone applications (including the AS3 Reference Guide, and Timetrocity). As I wrote previously, I think that the closed system that Apple is trying to create is bad for the industry, developers and ultimately consumers, and that is not something that I want to actively promote. Don’t worry though, I definitely plan to get both Pew Pew and Bacon Unicorn Adventure running on Android and am planning on open sourcing both.

Also Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen said “We have a number of excited partners who are working aggressively with us to bring Flash to their devices, whether they be smartphones as well as handsets, and so companies like Google or RIM or Palm are going to be releasing versions of Flash on smartphones and tablets in the second half of the year.”

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