Adobe Tries Creeping Back Onto the iPad, With Help From Greystripe
Steve Jobs says he’s not out to kill Adobe–he just wants nothing to do with its Flash platform. And Adobe appears to be getting the message: The company is working to find ways to get onto Apple devices without resorting to Flash.
Newest example: The software company, along with mobile ad network Greystripe, says it will be creating ads in HTML5 that work on the iPhone and iPad’s Flash-free Safari browser.
The pitch is that advertisers and their agencies can continue to create ads using Flash, the Web’s dominant platform for ad delivery, but that Greystripe will port the ads to Apple-friendly formats.
Apple (AAPL) has banned this kind of cross-compiling for iPad and iPhone apps. But it’s kosher for ads, Greystripe CEO Michael Chang tells me; he says Greystripe has already been doing this for in-app ads on the iPhone. The news here is that his company and Adobe (ADBE) are now trying to get Flash ads back onto Apple’s browsers.
Assuming this does work, that’s good news for Greystripe and Adobe (ADBE). But everyone in the mobile ad business got a lift last week, when Jobs made a point of saying that he didn’t intend to lock out other ad networks from the iPad and iPhone–and that he’d let them use some tracking information from the devices in the process.
