Back in the (Flash iPhone Dev) Game!
It came as a complete shock to me that Apple reversed its decision about allowing Flash-developed iPhone apps in the store. Even after the press covered the story, I didn’t believe it until later that same day Apple approved my Pieces of Eight game. That game had been sitting in the App Store review process 5 months! I’m glad I left it in there.
But this reversal of policy actually does two things. First, it reverses the policy, of course. So now you can use Flash CS5 with the “Packager for iPhone” to build apps. But second, it legitimizes the whole thing. Before, you had to wonder what Apple thought. No action on their part would have meant no information. We wouldn’t know what Apple would do in the future. But by reversing the policy, they are now on the record as saying “this is OK.”
That doesn’t mean they can’t change their mind in the future. But it does give me some amount of confidence that they won’t.
So where to from here?
Well, first, I’m right in the middle of updating my Flash Games book. So I’ll be adding a chapter on building iPhone games. As soon as I’m done that, I’ll be going back to making new games for the iPhone.
Not sure what will be next. When Apple pulled the plug in April, I was about to make a series of free games that would promote my pay games. But since then I’ve experimented with using advertising to support apps. And that seems like a much better way for me to go. So perhaps I’ll work on some free games with ads. The current CS5 packager doesn’t have any support for Apple’s iAd platform, but it may be able to handle third-party ad platforms. I’ll have to investigate.
So right now I’m still in the planning stages, but by the end of the year I expect to be spending a lot of time making iPhone games again.