MWC: Adobe Flash 10.1 used on 20 million smartphones

BARCELONA: Adobe has seen its Flash 10.1 software shipped in over 20 million smartphone devices just six months after release, and is already preparing its Air and Flash 10.2 applications.

Over six million downloads of the Flash application came from the Android Market alone, the firm said.

Meanwhile, the amount of video delivered via Flash across all platforms has reached a staggering 120 petabytes per month, Anup Murarka, director of product marketing at Adobe, told V3.co.uk at Mobile World Congress today.

Adobe Flash 10.2 was released for the desktop last week, and the mobile version will ship in the next few weeks and bring performance upgrades.

"Users will see video quality and battery performance improvements because we will be using a GPU that will be more efficient," Murarka said.

The upcoming Air release, meanwhile, will bring magazine content currently available on the iPad to Android 3.0 devices.

Adobe remains confident that Flash will survive the onslaught from HTML5, and is standing firm against Apple after the software was banned from the iPhone and iPad.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs noted in a now famous open letter that Flash is "no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content", saying that his main reasons for refusing to let Flash on Apple devices are " technology issues".

With the Flash platform being backed by Android, Murarka was confident enough to take a swipe the ability of Skyfire to bypass the Flash ban on the Apple devices.

"Skyfire is an interesting application, but it's not Flash. It is far from being able to render Flash content. They tried to scrap whatever content they could, but it's clearly not compatible with most Flash content," he said.

"Until Apple changes its policy about Flash in the browser, there is no more progress to be made."

Adobe expects over 132 million smartphones to support Flash by the end of 2011. This will be a third of the smartphones sold this year, representing 600 per cent growth year on year.