Are you a rock star Flash Developer but don’t want to learn Objective-C to release apps to the App Store? Maybe you’ve heard “It’s not possible to run Flash on iOS”. It’s all possible with Adobe Flash CS5!
The workflow is pretty simple. You take your Flash game, modify it a little bit to fit the screen resolution and touch input of your mobile device and export that exact game to iOS with just one single click. You will create your iOS app from within the Flash workspace using the same familiar tools. You can code ActionScript and use the built-in code snippets. There a several new code snippets added specifically for mobile devices. Flash has some new built-in ActionScript to deal with the mobile Accelerometer and touch events that have made the user experience with tablet devices so very popular.
Below are a couple of useful tutorials to show you how to setup your Flash project so you can export directly to iOS.
Creating iOS Apps Using Flash
Learn how to setup your Flash project settings. Note that the iOS export only supports ActionScript 3.0. Make sure you change the stage size to “960×640” pixels for iPhone 4, and “2048×1536” pixels for iPad so it works with the the latest retina display.
Creating a Distribution Provisioning Profile
In order for you to be able to submit apps to the Apple App Store you first need to register as a developer in the iOS Dev Center and pay a $99/year fee. If you want to launch an app on a device that requires a development provisioning profile, install the provisioning profile on the device. In Member Center, you can register individual devices as needed or multiple devices by uploading a file that contains information about each device.
Deploying to an iOS Device
After setting up the developer certificates and provisioning profiles in the Apple Developer Center and setting up the project with the proper settings, it should only take a couple of hours to get your app running on the iPad. Almost no code changes are necessary.
With this method, Flash will export your app as an IPA file which can be submitted to the App Store, it will not export your code into Objective-C. Therefore you will not be able to modify the app or add in-app purchases or enhanced native features. If you have a great Flash game that’s already done, this is the best way to export it, upload it to iTunes Connect and start making money in the App Store.
