Adobe Acro­bat Con­nect Pro Mobile is a piece of soft­ware recently released for iPhone/iPod touch that is rather inter­est­ing for a num­ber of rea­sons. I noticed it because it largely over­laps with a prod­uct that we’ve been can­vass­ing sup­port for to release on the iPad (and likely still will), but there seems to be a lot more going on here!

Firstly, it’s worth not­ing that this free soft­ware is pub­lished by Adobe, devel­oped using Flash, and is fea­tured in the App Store.

For those who keep their head off the Internet/are apa­thetic towards Apple’s mobile plat­form pow­er­plays, let me just briefly note that Apple and Adobe are hardly best of friends. Accord­ingly, while the approval of a Flash-based appli­ca­tion is a lit­tle cheeky, the ele­va­tion of one to fea­tured app store sta­tus is straight up devious.

We can only spec­u­late as to whether prag­matic or polit­i­cal rea­sons moti­vated Adobe’s devel­op­ment in this way. Self-evidently, they have a lot of in-house com­pe­ten­cies around Flash devel­op­ment, but they would also love to get a prod­uct approved inso­far as it dri­ves adop­tion of their Con­nect plat­form (which, unlike the App Store app, is any­thing but free).

There are many less sneaky ways of build­ing a com­pelling tech demo. If I had to guess, I’d attribute the use of Flash to a sub­stan­tial exist­ing soft­ware invest­ment for web-based clients that was largely portable to the mobile con­text. The impact this has on user expe­ri­ence is likely to be min­i­mal, as they likely redesigned the fron­tend entirely — though obvi­ously other per­for­mance con­cerns may apply.

At any rate, this is the first I’ve noticed of approvals of overtly Flash-based appli­ca­tions. If pos­si­ble, this may open the App Store flood­gates even fur­ther, while pro­vid­ing hope to many for whom the bar­rier to entry in terms of rewrit­ing code was sim­ply too high.

We’re excited about this as cer­tain com­po­nent parts of soft­ware we’ve devel­oped depends strongly on Flash for data visu­al­iza­tion and report­ing. The prospect of being able to deploy this on the iPhone (and yes, the iPad) is a com­pelling oppor­tu­nity that is, plainly, freak­ing exciting.

Tags: Adobe, app store, connect pro, development, Flash, iPad, iPhone