Ooh, it’s always fun to see somebody go completely off their rocker, and have a proper pop at someone else. It’s always nice to know big, important companies are as petty and vindictive as all us normal people are (well, alright, as we can be, when crossed). Today’s rant comes from Adobe, according to Engadget Mobile, who have decided to clarify, once and for all, why people can’t use Flash on the iPhone.
As you can see in the image on this blog post, they’ve updated the page you end up on, if you try to get Flash on the iPhone. And it now reads:
“Apple restricts use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch.”
Them be fighting words! I love it when you see a rant like that online, for two reasons. One, it’s incredibly sulky and pointed. Two, it has the added benefit of being absolutely true.
The only reason why they can’t port Flash over to the iPhone is because Apple don’t allow it under their terms and conditions, specifically the one that says “an Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”
Since I can’t see that ever changing, I can’t see it being likely Flash will ever run on the iPhone. Which is a bit of an issue, and not for Adobe, but for Apple. The iPhone 3GS may be a lot of things, but if you can’t actually view websites you want to view on it, it kinda defeats the entire purpose of having internet access on your phone. I mean, after all, more phones are coming out with it built-in, straight out of the box (the Sony Ericsson Satio springs immediately to mind), so if Apple are adamant they won’t let it on their phone, that’s going to make it less appealing, isn’t it?
And that’s not me doing Apple-bashing, that’s just common sense, surely?
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November 3rd, 2009 at 8:53 pm
According to MDN;
Flash is a putrid, bloated mess seemingly created to heat up CPUs, run down batteries, and crash browsers. There are far better and way more efficient ways to deliver video and interactive content (QuickTime, HTML 5) than to use Adobe’s horrid Flash. For a company that owes its very existence to Apple, Adobe has gotten quite brave peddling their bloated myriad suites to Windows PC sufferers. We hope Apple never allows Flash to blight iPhone OS devices; it’s bad enough we have to deal with it in our Mac browsers.
Back in January 2007, six months before iPhone’s release, The New York Times’ John Markoff interviewed Apple CEO Steve Jobs who said in reply to a Flash on iPhone question, “You don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using H.264 instead of the old codec.”
Apple subsequently did just that as YouTube moved to superior H.264 encoding. iPhone does not need Adobe’s Flash bloatware. That much is obvious; just look at the sales figures along with the beautiful video and 100,000+ apps that have been delivered without once having to cripple iPhone with Adobe’s Flash garbage. Adobe is simply being further marginalized and there’s nothing they can do about it, beyond delivering terse, whiny messages to users that blame Apple. Why don’t they get to work on making an efficient mobile version of Flash instead of designing mobile Web pages blaming others for their own ineptitude? Because they know their proprietary Flash mess will never be able to compete with HTML 5 and H.264, that’s why.