How to sell Flash Lite games? Make it Symbian!

September 27th, 2006 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air | 3 Comments »

Thanks go out to the Flash Lite For Mobile Developers Blog to pointing us toward Adobe for releasing their article on converting Flash Lite to a Symbian installers. As we pointed out in our own Flash test, installing a flash app of games is not easy to understand for the consumer as it plays the file after downloading it. This means the consumer has to tell the software to save the file. In our article, we used Mobizines as a background. Mobizines was already installed as a .sis file on our test 6670. Now converting a flash file to a sis file, means you force the device to install the game, but not only that. It allows you to sell it on all Symbian supporting sales channels.

Still even though this sounds good, there are two main problems. The first you encounter is that only the latest N-Series devices support Flash when coming from Nokia. The old series 60 do support flash, but only if downloaded by the consumer. A big problem as most consumers don’t know how to obtain it. Also remotely it’s not possible to scan for flash presence. The second one, is the one a lot of developers hoped not to pop up. “Symbian Signed”. Some operators want you to pass on this in order to get on their decks, or even disallow installing unsigned software via their firmware. So suddenly, the Flash Lite developers have certification to run trough.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “How to sell Flash Lite games? Make it Symbian!”

Anonymous says:

September 27, 2006 at 6:58 pm

Thanks for the article,
a couple of comments:
1) True, Flash Lite support is limited
2) Adobe

Reply
Alessandro says:

September 29, 2006 at 2:48 pm

Ciao,
I agree with Miikka, especially on point 4. You can access a FL site and you will be able to download FL content using DRM. Click on a link and that’s it. The user will save the file to the phone. Also the mobile phone will recognize the MIME and will put the file in the FL directory.
Alessandro

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Jeff says:

September 29, 2006 at 6:30 pm

Our team just wrapped up development of two new flash lite games.
As someone who has only worked with BREW and JAVA development, working with Flash Lite was a great experience and I really can not wait to start working on new FL projects.

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