Over the past few months I have been focusing my blog on providing some insight into the challenges of developing mobile financial applications for smart phones and some of the ways development teams can tackle them. One of the strategies I suggested was to use a technology platform that offered a convergence among the smart phone platforms, such as WebKit.

In this light, Adobe has made two major announcements today that will make life much easier for vendors developing media rich applications for smart phones. The first is the release of Flash Player 10.1 which will bring Flash applications to Windows® Mobile, Palm® webOS, Google® Android™, Symbian® OS with Blackberry® to follow shortly. The second announcement is that Flash Professional CS5 will allow developers to compile their Flash applications into native iPhone code and package into an iPhone application! In other words, as of today Flash has become a platform to develop one codebase to deploy across multiple smart phone platforms. The added bonus is that Adobe has added full support for native device capabilities including support for multi-touch, gestures, mobile input models, accelerometer and screen orientation.

It is also interesting to note that Flash is a rich UI platform with strong multimedia support allowing developers to build very powerful and compelling interactive applications. This could prove very beneficial to mobile financial service providers as it is likely that the unique user experience that each provider offers will become part of their brand identity. Being able to replicate this experience identically across multiple smart phone platforms, using Flash, would be tremendously beneficial in maintaining that brand.