The one thing common between the Apple iPhone and the Apple iPAD, except the fact that they both have an aesthetic appeal, wonderfully working touch screen and the illustrious brand name of Apple is the fact that both of them do not support Flash, which is one of the most prominent rich internet applications from Adobe. The spat between Apple and Adobe has been going on for many years now, and the exclusion of Flash from iPhone and iPad is just another chapter to this ever growing war between the two.
[ad]Flash is not only used for viewing videos, or creating multimedia websites, but it also can be used to create various applications and games, which has increased its popularity and reach many-fold, making it one of the de facto installations on the computers of people who surf the internet. The decision that Apple is not planning to provide support has made a lot of iPhone owners whine, more so, since Adobe came up with a Flash version for all major mobile operating systems like Windows Mobile OS, Palm’s webOS and even the Google Android, missing out only on iPhone’s Safari OS.
Apple’s Side of the Story
Apple has been adamant in not supporting Adobe Flash, since allowing Flash is against the Terms of Service Agreement of the iPhone. The main reason for this as per Apple’s software engineers is that allowing Flash will open a lot of backdoors or open up loop holes for malicious applications to misuse the information and even hamper the usability of the iPhone or the iPAD.
Moreover, historically, Apple’s MAC OS has never been in proper sync with the Flash player. Most complaints that the Apple Inc gets for the browser crashes is due to the use of Flash plug-ins and hence Apple is trying to stay safe by not providing the support for Flash at all, rather than allow Flash to compete for the battery life and the CPU cycles on the iPhone and the iPAD.
The “Other” Side of the Story
Apple is known to be a strongly coupled company when it comes to protecting its proprietary stuff. Allowing Flash to run on iPhone will not only enable users to view Flash content on their iPhone or iPAD, but it will also allow a lot of Flash applications and games to compete with their counterparts on the App Store. This will surely result in huge revenue losses for Apple.
Moreover, in the current scenario, all the things related to Apple iPhone and iPAD are owned completely by Apple and hence if they wish to make some drastic change like a Platform or architecture change, they can port and recompile their codes and libraries. However, if they allow Flash and then decide to do such a change, since Flash remains owned by Adobe, Apple would need to maintain some sort of a backward compatibility to ensure Flash support remains ON, until Adobe gets them the ported version of Flash.
Consolidating the Facts
The funny fact about Adobe Flash is that while all the major building blocks of the internet like HTML and CSS are open source, the most prominent proprietary software in the web-world is Adobe Flash. The popularity of Flash feeds itself and the result is it gets used more often. So the people who oppose the one company ownership idea like the fact that Apple is slowly weeding out Flash by sowing the seeds for HTML5.
[ad#r]Moreover, it is a known experience that while Flash works pretty well with Windows, it cannot do the same with Apple’s OS because the later does not allow Flash to access the lower level APIs and squeeze the maximum benefit from the hardware. However, while Adobe cribs that Apple doesn’t allow its platform level optimizations to be used for Flash, Steve Jobs rubbished Flash for being buggy and that was the reason why Apple is not too keen on granting support to Flash, and instead it supports HTML5 more getting the newer web-based applications.
Final Verdict
The reason why the Flash support on iPhone and iPAD isn’t encouraged is a combination of both Apple’s way of trying to preserve its supremacy for the games and applications that get shipped for the iPhone and the iPAD, and also Apple’s intolerant behavior towards very stringent quality standards which currently Adobe Flash is not being able to adhere to.
For now, the situation is a dead lock and in midst of all odds, Adobe has come up with a bunch of tools which allow the Flash applications to get converted to a format where they can be loaded on iPhone. However, these applications match neither the performance, nor the elegance of what the original Flash could have offered.
And this leads us to the final big question is: When will Apple step down and allow a third party plug-in provider like Adobe access to its lower level APIs?
For now, the answer seems to be NEVER.
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I know it shortens the battery life, but for me it out be a tremendous improvement for iDevices. I spend a lot of time on betting websites and without flash it’s very hard to navigate. Let’s hope they will get along with Adobe anytime soon.
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This is a a very balanced post. Both pro and con arguments are stated very clearly. My opinion is that Apple will want to maintain its supremacy no matter what even if that means to disappoint some of its clients.
I was really hoping that the new iPad was going to get flash. I do realize that their are cons to this, but I just think it is a much bigger pro for me personally to get flash on these devices.
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Very balanced article..Very few who write about this controversy tap into the fact that the real reason Apple is refusing the use of Flash is because of it’s ability to side step the appstore and thus break out of steve Job’s walled off garden. I hope that other tablet and phone makers are able to catch up with apple and show snazzy applications that are being built with flash… While I do see the argument that Apple does not want to slow down changes to its operating system because a company that has built popular apps will be broken if they has not made necessary changes… seems like a bit of red herring in that changes to the operating system are not happen that fast and thus far not that drastically. I hope the E.U. takes up a case against Apple for this, because Steve Jobs seems to be changing the whole paradigm of computing, in that up to this point we bought a machine and viewed and loaded it with what resources that would function on it, to now change and say only the resource we approve of is kind of like buying a car and being told, you can’t put certain after maker parts on it even if they fit because they were not bought from the dealership approved store… imagine if every computer manufacturer takes this approach… the growing web developing industry would become fractured and innovation will slow… All this so one person, Steve Jobs, can have a private garden and amass more wealth … I can’t even write about this with out thinking how absurd and wrong head this is… and how hollow his assertions about Adobe Flash is just not good enough as the reason why flash is not on ipad, iphone … whether you like flash or not … no developer who cares about growth and innovation should be supporting Steve Jobs ridiculousness
Wow, what a well written article!…Very balanced!
It can be thought that Apple is just protecting the lucrative apps store…But Flash doesn’t seem that to hurt the Android app store…So there might be another important reason and you put that to words very well:
“The main reason for this as per Apple’s software engineers is that allowing Flash will open a lot of backdoors or open up loop holes for malicious applications to misuse the information and even hamper the usability of the iPhone or the iPAD.”
That feels much more positve than seeing Apple as a greedy, evil company…
I do feel that the words that Steve Jobs words about Flash are full of false statements (like “Flash isn’t build for touch interaction”)…
He caused a “we hate Flash/Adobe” vibe in the Apple community that isn’t justified at all…
Xander