I love Apple. I confess I’m a pure fanboy, writing this post on a Macbook Pro I’m very proud of, and I really admire what Steve Jobs has managed to do with this company in just more than 10 years since he returned. But yesterday he did another of these annoying things I really hate: he denigrated a competitor. I mean, when you have great products like Apple does, you don’t need to do that sort of things, and if you do, it obviously means that you are afraid of them.
So when Steve Jobs says that “Flash is not suited for the iPhone“, I don’t hear “Flash will never be available on the iPhone” but “Flash will eventually adapt to the iPhone and when this day comes, we’ll have to deal with it.” The truth is that Adobe has been doing huge things with Flash lately, thanks to Flex. And I’m sure Steve is aware of that. And I see absolutely no coincidence in him spreading that kind of FUD on the same day he’s announcing the iPhone SDK.
For months, Apple has been telling us that we didn’t need any SDK for the iPhone, because we could just write standard AJAX web applications, which is nothing more than a transitional form of rich internet application. Now that the SDK is out (and it really amazes me by the way, but that’s another topic), the web application way of doing things looks really poor in comparison, both more complex to use and less integrated than its heavyweight client alternative. But what if Adobe comes up with a Flash runtime for the iPhone supporting Flash 9 and Tamarin? Then we will have Flex applications on the iPhone, in other words easy-to-develop apps, with no need to go through the App Store. And if Adobe does things right and uses the full power of the iPhone APIs, maybe we could have some special capabilities to integrate multi-touch and other advanced features into our rich mobile applications.
Wouldn’t it be great?!
Now the question is, if Adobe comes with such an adapted Flash support, will Apple accept this alternative and pre-install it on all new iPhones?
I really hope so… But what do you think?
1 Comment
Tony Fendall · March 16, 2008 at 11:38 pm
The best theory I have heard on the whole issue came from Robert Scoble, and suggests that the issue is instead that Adobe wants Apple to put PDF support on the iPhone. Apple on the other hand is looking ahead to putting eBooks and news papers on the iPhone and wants to make sure they limit them to a DRM enabled technology. Having PDF on the iPhone would thwart this.
Rumor has it that the Flash Player has been running on the iPhone internally at Apple for several months now without any problems.