Your Church is Getting a (Flash) iPhone App!

iPhoneYesterday Adobe announced that Flash CS5 will allow developers to export their Flash projects as iPhone apps. I think that’s really cool and the announcement produced the following thoughts in me:

  • Oh tight! Now I can develop some of my own apps instead of outsourcing to developers (which I don’t mind doing, for the record)! :-D
  • Oh man. I wonder if this will increase all the garbage apps in the iTunes store. :-/
  • Hmmm…I wonder if this will allow development of more premium apps on a smaller budget. :-)

After that, I did not give it much thought. That is, until I drove into work this morning.

While daydreaming on I-35 a new thought hit me. If you’ve read Church Tech Dump long (there might be 2 of you…hi mom!) then you know my thoughts about iPhone apps for churches. In a nutshell, at this point they are novel but don’t do much more than a mobile website. This of course does not take into account the appearance of YouVersion Live (does that come out tomorrow?).

Now, with the news that Flash will be a development platform for the iPhone, things change a bit. There is now a lower barrier to entry for developing iPhone applications. The learning curve for creating something useful with Flash is much smaller. Your church may already have someone on staff who can move around in Flash with some level of comfort. Now, even if your church’s iPhone app is nothing but something neat to look at, at least you didn’t spend $10k developing it.

According to this FAQ, apps developed in Flash will still have access to some of the iPhone’s APIs including:

  • MultiTouch
  • Screen Orientation
  • Saving images to Photo Library
  • Accelerometer
  • Geo-location
  • Cut / Copy / Paste

That’s fun!

One thing that I guarantee will happen is we will begin to see app templates made available on sites like themeforest.net. Imagine developing a native app using a template that you bought for $30. That’s kind of fun…as long as your app actually does something useful that a website cannot do. Time will tell. If you have any ideas about what a useful iPhone app built in Flash looks like, please share!