Adobe-Apple war likely to intensify with release of Wallaby converter

Adobe has made a smart move by providing developers with the Wallaby tool that converts Flash to HTML, but it is likely to intensify the firm's war with Apple, according to analysts.

Nick McQuire, EMEA research director for enterprise mobility at IDC, told V3.co.uk that the creation of the Wallaby tool is a good move for Adobe and will pay off in the long run.

"Although HTML5 is in its infancy, it has a significant future in terms of web-based mobile applications, so Adobe needs to have an answer on this architecture regardless of its spat with Apple," he said.

However, Apple will not be happy with the arrival of Wallaby, noted James Governor, co-founder at analyst firm RedMonk.

"The spat is personal now and Apple is going after Adobe's key markets in media. The advertising business is worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars a year and both want a slice of it," he said.

"Apple is pushing for in-app ads that it controls, whereas Wallaby attempts to open up the Apple devices again so they become browsers on steroids, rather than places to run iOS apps."

Although Flash remains popular with developers, Governor added that only a very small proportion of Apple users are aggrieved that they can't run Flash content on their devices, as iOS is generally acknowledged to provide an excellent user experience.

Despite being verbally bashed in an infamous open letter by Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, Adobe has always stood by its platform.

With the release of the Wallaby tool, Adobe is now able to bypass the Flash ban on Apple devices by converting the artwork and animation from Adobe Flash Professional files into HTML.

Wallaby is available to download for developers now from Adobe Labs, although the software is still in the testing and validation phase.

However, the firm is unlikely to move away from Flash after claiming that version 10.1 of the software has shipped in over 20 million smartphones just six months after release.

Six million downloads came from the Android Market alone, and Adobe expects over 132 million smartphones to support Flash by the end of 2011, a third of all smartphones sold this year.

Anup Murarka, director of product marketing at Adobe, has also gone on record as stating that the Skyfire application is not an adequate substitute for Flash, telling V3.co.uk that "it's clearly not compatible with most Flash content".