By Ryan Paul
November 18, 2008 - 01:03AM CT

Adobe has announced plans to port Flash Player 10 and the AIR runtime to the ARM architecture so that the software can be used on phones and other devices. The announcement is significant because it demonstrates that Adobe intends to close the gap between desktop and mobile Flash capabilities and make Flash technology a more competitive choice for platform-neutral mobile development.

Platform fragmentation is one of the most significant challenges faced today by mobile application developers. Programmers who want to target a broad selection of popular handsets and mobile hardware products are forced to port their applications to many different platforms—a task that is arduous and costly. Flash and AIR offer one potential solution by providing cross-platform runtime environments that are available on a wide range of devices.

In theory, this allows developers to write their code once and allows users to run it on desktops, on smartphones, or in a web browser. Adobe's mobile strategy previously focused on Flash Lite, a slimmed down version of Flash that isn't compatible with the latest desktop version. Flash Lite 3, the most recent version of Flash Lite, is loosely compatible with Flash 8 and has some other limitations.

The dichotomy between Flash and Flash Lite has created some fragmentation within Adobe's own ecosystem and has degraded some of the portability advantages of using Flash as an application platform. Moving forward with a full port of Flash Player 10 that is optimized for ARM will begin to end that dichotomy and will eventually lead to a fully unified Flash Player across both the desktop and mobile spaces.