Flash on the iPhone? Not Exactly.

The Flash gaming community has always felt like a portrait of cognitive dissonance. On one side, you have pioneering developers like Adam Atomic, who work to establish Flash as an authentic gaming platform worthy of serious respect, whether it’s through creating ActionScript-based frameworks like Flixel to give fellow developers a leg-up, or producing beautiful, atmospheric games like Canabalt that force you to consider these games as a legitimate art form.

These developers are often the public face of Flash development. They are true innovators responsible for the remarkable creative acceleration of a once-fledgling medium. They were the ones speaking at indie-game conferences years ago, labeled as visionaries, discussing the program’s (as well as ActionScript’s) potential to become a bold new frontier for rich web-based gaming.

To see the other side of the picture, all you have to do is go to any popular Flash portal, where most spotlighted games seem to be made by preadolescents (judging by the grammar level on the chatrooms). Extremely primitive art and physics abound on most Flash games in these portals, and while there are great shoot-’em-ups, strategy games and platformers here, the majority of games in this space are point-and-click adventures requiring relatively little coding ability. What’s more, the developers either aren’t yet talented or discerning enough to create a quality experience. Even I taught myself how to make little Flash animations and programs when I was only 13—it’s among the easiest industry-standard creative software to learn.

So despite the attempts of some to persuade us that Flash games are rich experiences, the medium’s biggest thing going for it right now continues to be its accessibility to developers. The barrier to entry is extremely low, and there are tons of online resources for kids to dive right into Flash programming using the many hours of spare time they have on hand and a pirated or trial copy of the software. Flash opens the playing field at the expense of having the aggregate quality of its games lag far behind their console counterparts.

Which brings us, finally, to the iPhone, and specifically, Adobe’s announcement back in October that the upcoming version of its software, Flash CS5 Professional, will contain the ability to export its files into native iPhone applications. When this was first announced, most blog coverage on the subject centered around freaking out over the feature’s current implementation, like its technical shortcomings and Adobe’s possible violation of the iPhone SDK agreement by even doing this in the first place. However, the feature is currently an early beta. So let’s just assume for the rest of this article that Adobe will overcome the major technical hurdles required to create a decently-performing, non-awful native iPhone app developed in Flash.

There are a bunch of smart people over there, guys. I’m sure they can figure this out. But as far as I know, iPhone apps have been exclusively written in Objective-C up until now—a programming language that might not be so accessible or widely-known among younger adults or teens. So, the introduction of this feature to Flash could really represent the democratization of the iPhone as a mobile console platform. However, that comes with a ton of both positive and negative implications.

For the specific use of Flash on the iPhone platform, a few immediate issues come to mind for me. The first is the absence of UIKit—that framework which provides a ton of touch-friendly interface assets for the graphics-challenged developer. I'm thinking we might see an influx of virtually unusable apps from amateur devs who created 10-pixel-high buttons that are too small to be accurately selected with a finger. A similar issue lies in the absence of an iPhone simulator—without that extra step which lets developers debug their apps and get a gauge for how their app is going to look on the display, we might be soon seeing a bunch of buggy or particularly poorly-designed games developed in Flash.

You know, there's ALREADY a great solution for Flash developers who want to create iPhone games: learn Objective-C and develop in Xcode! Many developers have done just that with great success, like the aforementioned Adam Atomic and his game Canabalt. He turned a Flash game gone viral into a critically acclaimed $3 iPhone touch platformer. Some even say that the iPhone version is better than the original. For those who don't want to take this path, though, Adobe's blown the gates to the App Store wide open, for better or worse.