April 29th, 2010 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: Adobe Flash & Air, Platforms: iOS | No Comments »
In an open letter, Steve Jobs explains what the relationship with Adobe was and will be for the future and that future, will stay ‘flashless’ as far as Apple is concerned.
In his open letter, Steve explains that Apple has done a lot to get Adobe off the ground in the early days and, that half of Adobe’s creative suite buyers are actually Apple consumers. That’s how it has been, but the companies grew apart at some point. In the remainder of the letter, Jobs starts burning Adobe down.
First of all, Jobs explains that the App Store is not as closed as Adobe says it is and at the same time he accuses Adobe that Flash is not as open as Adobe claims it to be. Flash products are only available via Adobe and that makes it a closed system. Apple believes all web standards should be open and as so, it chose for HTML5, CSS and Javascript for their browsers. HTML5 is controlled by a standards committee of which Apple is just a member.
Jobs also says that Adobe’s claim that the iDevices would only be able to visit 75% of the web is not true because YouTube comes as an app and YouTube is responsible for about 40% of the video content on the web. The fact that consumers can’t play Flash games remains true. The alternative would be the 50.000 games on the app store, which is more than on any other platform.
Another issue is security. Jobs mentions that Symantex has listed Flash as one of the technologies with the worst security in 2009. In fact, Flash is the number one reasons Mac’s crash according to Jobs. Including Flash would be a reliability and security risk for the consumer. Also, the performance on mobile is far from great. Adobe hasn’t been able to convince Apple with a good demo.
Another consideration is the battery life. If video would be decoded in Flash software, it would eat away much more resources compared to the hardware decoding that is happening now.
Touch seems to be an issue as well (this was addressed before). Many flash content relies on roll-overs from a mouse. This doesn’t happen with a touch interface. This would render a lot of flash based websites useless.
Finally, Apple is not at all happy with the idea of having Flash as a layer between an app and a user. We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
The full letter is a must read, so check it here.
