If Apple’s position on Flash wasn’t perfectly clear, Steve Jobs has taken the time to write a 1500-word open letter regurgitating the party lines at length. In a word (or three), Apple’s position is “Flash sucks unwashed balls”.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
It’s nothing Apple hasn’t said before, in one form or another – that Flash is a closed battery-and-resource whore that sucks the life out of Apple’s innovation and you just don’t need it anyway. The idea behind Jobs himself repeating the reasons Apple hates Flash is that you’ll finally shut up about it. [Apple]
matt
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 9:27 AMlol, what a joke, like it would be so hard to add touch support to it! flash is a powerful platform that worked great on all platforms, right up until Adobe met the incompetence that is Apple’s Developer support. how the hell would something being ‘standard’ magically lead to good battery life?? and in your absolute hypocrisy apple, if your iphone WAS truly an open web standard, it would ALLOW ANY PLUGGINS LIKE FLASH!!! who the hell cares that its closed?? as long as there are alternatives! why don’t you just let it compete with your all mighty standards, then we’d see whats what. we’d see that they still can’t hold a candle to flash’s features! and saying flash is bloated because it won’t run on your iphone is like saying the quake III engine is bloated because it won’t run on your calculator!!! it’s not it’s fault that the hardware isn’t there yet! (even tho it is, its just Apple’s shit APIs and OS that is crippling it). now I whole heartedly agree that there are better, more efficient options for the majority of stuff that flash is used for, and would be a necessity on mobile devices atm, but that is no reason to crucify flash! and no reason not to leave it there running along side the new web standards! then we could really see whats what!
I am so sick of all of this! Apple are only into standards when they are too lazy or incompetent to release something better! be assured that if implementing something proprietary would help them they would do it! (like all those music and video formats??)
but as long as they can’t have a hand in the market place, they don’t want anyone else to either!
on top of this is the real reason they won’t implement flash! new grounds!
“The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for ”
yeah, and those 200,000 apps are all available on every platform and mobile because they were created using open standard…. oh wait… no, they were created using an SDK that is not only proprietary, but only available on Apple’s platforms…
The utter, blatant hypocrisy, next to absolute arrogance, is why I hate Apple.
Realism
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 11:39 AMMatt, so don’t buy anything from Apple, and save yourself hours and hours of angst by not worrying about them. I don’t care whether you love or loathe Apple, and I’m betting more than 5 billion earthlings share my apathy for your opinions.
Wok
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 1:11 PMWhat about the Users?
I’m sick of not being able to check a live score or something because it’s implemented in Flash on my iPhone.
BTW, Flash Player is open source (just like webkit).
There’s a million ways to develop Flash content for free Adobe even provide some free tools Flex SDK etc.
Jobs is a hypocrite. Apple is far more closed than Adobe has ever been.
It’s looking unlikely my next phone will be an iPhone… I mean really a forward facing camera was innovation maybe 5 years ago.
James C
Saturday, May 1, 2010 at 12:17 AM@Wok
repeating that point won’t make it true. Flash is not open source at all. It is an open specification, but there are no other IDEs for flash. It’s source code is not available for anyone to implement. No one else except Adobe can make a version of Flash. It is the opposite of open source.
Bernie
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 10:09 AM:) Tell us what you really think Matt.
As an aside, I have quite a few crash logs on my PC that shows flash killing bot IE and Firefox. Does that mean the developers of those applications are at fault as well?
Personally I think there could be a middle ground reached here. Flash could be used for small things such as Ads etc. while we use HTML5 for movies etc. This would give us access to all media as well as battery life.
Captain Pajama Shark
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 10:29 AM@matt
+1
Matt
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 11:08 AMApple doesnt even know the meaning of open standards… All their Displayport crap etc… Apple = Fail
James C
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 12:51 PM@matt – show me a mobile device that runs Flash well. You can’t? Oh, that must mean every hardware manufacturer out there is ‘lazy & incompetent’.
RE: video & audio standards. Both h.264 & .aac (that iTunes uses) are open standards (although the videos still use a FairPlay DRM wrapper), so I’m not quite sure what you’re on about there.
As for their ‘proprietary’ development platform for Apps – isn’t Flash just as closed? Try to build a Flash website for me without using Adobe products.
Personally, I think Adobe’s efforts should be directed at creating a proper IDE for HTML5. There’s plenty of opportunity there to make a world-class development environment unique in the market, and by being purely focused on Flash I think they’re doing themselves a disservice.
Wok
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 1:12 PMH.264 is propitiatory too.
James C
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 1:59 PMNo, you’re wrong. While there are patents held on the standard, that does not equate to a closed proprietary technology. Anyone can build an encoder or a player that uses H.264 video.
Pinball
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 1:05 PMIt’s interesting to read Steve Jobs’ thoughts on the matter. He puts across a fairly rational argument, I think.
He does however kind of suggest that Adobe is stuck in the past, unlike Apple. I think that in a general sense Apple’s corporate communication is somewhat stuck in the past. I mean wouldn’t it be nice if Apple had a corporate blog where Steve and other Apple big wigs write about what Apple are doing / sharing their thoughts on new technologies and tech trends etc.
Wok
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 1:13 PMOh and one other thing… Apples own website doesn’t display properly on the iPhone… go check out the Apple/iPhone HTML5 Development reference to see what I mean.
TheOtherView
Saturday, May 1, 2010 at 6:18 PMIt has been suggested in the media that HP spending 1.2BN on Palm was wasted resources. However, that is incredibly pale to the losses Adobe have made in purchasing Macromedia.
With flash signed away to die in a fire of HTML5, flash is making it’s way to the graveyard of floppy disks and CRTs. This leaves Adobe very little to show for their absolutely massive purchase of Macromedia in 2005.
The end results of all of this:
Adobe spent 3.4BN in 2005(not adjusted for inflation), and all they got for it was an Adobe GoLive replacement.
For a fraction of that money they could have improved GoLive to far exceed Dreamweaver. So Adobe have egg on their face, and like any credible business: they are and will do anything possible to make their investment float.
It’s not well timed for Apple however- with all of the advertising space Adobe has purchased for their recently released CS5 suite, Adobe have used all their free editorial in creating an astroturf groundswell of Apple criticism. Greatly exaggerating the “loss” of flash on the iPhone OS platform. (Consumers haven’t particularly minded for the last 3 years.)
—
As a developer, I would rather Adobe champion a quality set of HTML5 tools. Google & Facebook are living proof that consumers will embrace appropriate online applications and HTML5 will be what gives us that, flash simply can’t do that. (For the same reasons why Java applets don’t.)
Bong Ebbighausen
Monday, November 8, 2010 at 2:17 AMWhy is it that the content reminds me of one other similar engineered so I just read somewhere else?