No Flash Support For The iPhone

Is the iPhone going to ship without support for Flash video and animation? It looks like that might be the case; Apple blog TUAW is reporting that Apple told developers at the WWDC to not put Flash video into their sites designed for the iPhone. They quote Apple as saying "There will be no Flash support at the moment on the iPhone". The remark was apparently made at the State Of The Media briefing at the developer’s conference, which wasn’t open to the press. It seems unlikely that they would change their minds this close to launch and include Flash, but this doesn’t mean that Flash won’t be supported soon; it could be included as Safari plug-in that could be downloaded.

This is a blow, though; although the iPhone will support Quicktime streaming video, Flash support could have made it a lot easier for developers to create interactive web pages. Flash is also more widely used for streaming video than quicktime, so support for that would open up a new world of streaming video to the iPhone. However, Apple may still have something up their sleeve; they recently announced that the AppleTV media streaming device will support YouTube in June, so they might be planning something similar for the iPhone.