
Flash on iPhone would be a huge revenue leak - pchristensen
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/is-the-iphone-application-store-the-problem-for-adobe-flash/
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wallflower
Maybe Apple is just being Machiavellian...

"In any case, the iPhone is Apple's best shot at killing Flash, and Apple
appears happy to be using it as such...Excluding Flash is a huge slap in the
face of Adobe, which is pushing Flash as the basis of its AIR and Flex web
application strategies. Adobe likes to advertise that nearly every PC has a
Flash plugin installed. Suddenly, nearly every mobile that has access to the
real Internet won't have Flash, making it far less attractive across the
board."

"Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of
mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple
wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest
common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices."

[http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-5595-4746-BFCE-524BBA7C7A85.html)

~~~
tx
Death of Flash, mobile Java and Silverlight... this is so awesome, go Apple
go!

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jrockway
Between the tagline ("For Executives, Entrepreneurs, and other Digerati who
need to know about SaaS and Web 2.0.") and the photo, I knew this wasn't a
post worth reading.

Also, this is nice: "Java is an interpreted language. The JVM is the Java
interpreter."

~~~
mattmaroon
Can we all just agree that whether or not Java is an interpreted language is
not really relevant to the post? Let's direct further criticism at the
arguments and conclusions rather than small technical gaffes.

~~~
sophist
I don't think anyone is claiming that Java is an interpreted language. The
claim is that "interpreted language" to most managerial, non-hacker PHB types
means "a language that at some point during execution requires
interpretation."

~~~
mattmaroon
I don't think non-hacker types even know what an interpreted language is. It's
simply part of his explanation as to why flash would be an end run around
iTunes. Even if he made a minor technical gaffe in calling Java an interpreted
language or whatever (he also called Flex a language and a framework, when the
language is action script right?) it's entirely irrelevant.

Anally nitpicking at that sort of thing does nothing to further discussion,
and I hate to see it here so often.

~~~
sophist
_I don't think non-hacker types even know what an interpreted language is._

That was actually my point. When someone doesn't know the technical meaning of
a phrase, they generally assume the literal and broad meaning of it. The
target audience for the original blog post presumably falls mainly into that
category.

And just because something is not of particular interest to _you_ doesn't make
it anal nitpicking that "does nothing to further discussion."

~~~
mattmaroon
It is of interest to me, it's just a minor technical mistake that has no
relevance whatsoever to the overall article, and is therefore nitpicking.

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koblas
While I'm no flash fanboy, I will say that the crux is dead on. Apple is all
about razor blades.. They'll sell you a iPhone or an iPod and the find a way
to extract lots of small dollars from the sale of music or applications for
your device.

Putting a full featured version of flash on the device would be a trivial way
to avoid the Apple store, load your Kongregate (or other casual app core) then
you've got access to that whole development community and disenfranchise Apple
in the process.

Right now as long as you're shopping the isles of wallmart (oh, Apple.com) for
your applications they can insure that you get no free stuff and have to pay
for everything, thus controlling the pipe and the revenue.

~~~
tlrobinson
I don't think that's really true. Apple makes more money on hardware than
anything else. The iTunes Store helps sell more iPods, not as much the other
way around.

I think Apple's decision to require all iPhone apps be sold through the iTunes
Store is partially a matter of control. If an app is malicious or misbehaves,
they can easily pull it.

~~~
koblas
It might be true, tried to find the gross revenue per unit for an iPod (unable
to). However, during my investigation I did find this interesting blog post.

    
    
      http://daringfireball.net/2008/01/aapl_q1_2008
    

The author makes a few interesting notes about Apples Q1: * Mac sales and
iPhone sales were equal * The gross revenue per iPod was $181

Also, apple made $808M on iTunes.

There is one interesting bit of foretelling in the post (written 5 months ago)

    
    
         The market for third-party software for the iPhone and iPod Touch is already big, and I expect that by this time two years from now, there will be more iPhones/iPod Touches in use than Macs. (Imagine the unit sale numbers for a $199 iPhone two years from now.)

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god
Same could be said about Javascript. But as far as I know, IPhone has
Javascript.

~~~
axod
They have some pretty cool webapps also: <http://www.apple.com/webapps/> on
which you can get listed pretty easily.

I'd say webapps are still the way to go unless you _need_ access to some
hardware that isn't exposed to the browser.

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BobWarfield
There have been bytecode versions of many languages for ages. Smalltalk is a
language most people view as interpreted that executed bytecodes way back
when. Basic "compitlers" have generated bytecodes for ages. Lisp compilers,
ditto.

This definition of interpreted, that leaves Java not being interpreted is
interesting, but one would have to conclude if you buy that definition not
much of anything is interpreted save a few scripting langauges.

Wikipedia is absolutely on target with the definition I used for an
interpreted language. It's the one I was taught when I got a CS degree. One
could've argued even then that most CPU's execute microcode, and that there
were even CPU's you could download new microcode to, so that was the only "one
true" compiled world. But this is not the general meaning of the word.

There are tons of apps available in Flex that do all kinds of useful things
that Apple will want to charge for. Javascript is an interesting case. I
wonder how complete the implementation is on the iPhone and whether all apps
execute fine there? Anyone have any complex Javascript to try it with?

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dsplaisted
It doesn't sound too plausible to me. It's only a revenue leak if the flash
applications are going to stop people from paying money for Apps at the App
store. But I think flash would mostly be used for free stuff, and would only
really compete with the free Apps in the app store.

~~~
drawkbox
You don't think apps from apple could contain flash? I think it is more of a
video battle and a lock down on interface look and feel. If we remember, Apple
played this closed market approach with the desktop and look where that got
them. I would hate to see them make the same mistake a decade or two later.

~~~
allenbrunson
"Apple played this closed market approach with the desktop and look where it
got them:" It got them in the position of being the ONLY company making
consumer computers that still has any margins to speak of. HP, Compaq, Dell,
et al are all racing each other to the bottom, trying to eke out a minimal
survival on razor-thin margins.

Apple's stumbles in the 80s and 90s weren't because they failed to license
MacOS, it was because Jobs was immature and shot himself in the foot, taking
his company down with him. These days they couldn't possibly be doing any
better, and you can bet your ass Jobs still thinks licensing MacOSX is a
terrible idea.

~~~
drawkbox
Apple lost plain and simple because they were closed market, some things never
change. You can get an early lead like that but eventually open systems and
open markets win out.

It is all in the numbers. Sure there is MUCH more mediocrity when you open it
up, and you can control and only allow the best in a closed market. But in the
end the percentage of better systems at the upper threshold of the open system
will always beat the best hand picked companies that can participate. One big
reason is competition, the other is greed and laziness that comes with that.

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tlrobinson
Unless Adobe were allowed to break Flash out of the browser and store .swfs
locally you would still need to load the app every time from the web. Of
course you can already do the same sort of things with JavaScript. If
SquirrelFish makes it to the iPhone (it would be silly not to) all JavaScript
apps will receive a huge boost in performance.

Plus Flash most likely wouldn't have access to many of the features native
iPhone apps do.

Jobs simply hates Flash and Java. I talked to someone who did some advertising
work for Apple, and they had some Flash thing that Steve needed to approve,
but supposedly he _refuses_ to install Flash on his computer, so they had to
do a screencast just for him.

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shimon
There is a factual error in this article, in the razor/blades analogy. The
monthly service fees for an iPhone don't just benefit the carrier; a portion
of the service fees goes to Apple as well. I'm not sure what the portion is
(or if that information is public) but this sort of revenue-sharing approach
is now relatively common for big-name smartphones.

~~~
wmf
For the iPhone 2G it is rumored that Apple gets a monthly kickback from AT&T.
For the iPhone 3G it is rumored that Apple gets over $200 upfront from AT&T
and nothing after that.

But as someone else pointed out, if you make money on the razor _and_ the
blades it's not the Gillette business model.

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elai
This might be my ignorance of virtual machines, but what prevents vm authors
to compile bytecode into asm??

~~~
rtf
Not a whole lot, but compiling to the machine is a more difficult task than
writing an interpreter. "Just-In-Time" VMs (Java and Flash 9 both do this) do
some amount of this compilation as the program starts and executes. That lets
them strike a balance between startup time(running a full compile can be quite
slow) and execution speed.

~~~
GrandMasterBirt
The point is ability to INSTALL it. Compiling the bytecode of flash into C or
whatever iPhone runs on is not the problem it can be done if necessary, its
actually having anything run on the iPhone that is...

The advantage of bytecode is that it can run on any operating
system/architecture, the VM will take care of executing it as binary code on
whatever system it is installed on. This way you can go to youtube from any OS
and if you have flash installed it works. Its not just about compiling into
binary and startup times :)...

Now having said that when are the iPhone ruby and python VMs coming out?

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philswenson
this is silly... I think they just don't want it to suck and there probably
isn't a good way to get flash to run on the iphone without sucking given the
zoom in/zoom out feature in safari.

flash would not challenge a native iphone app, you wouldn't have access to all
the cool iphone APIs. It would only be marginally better than a standard web
app.

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axod
I don't see why anyone would want flash on their iPhone to be honest.

Video works fine on the iphone with youtube etc, and that's only really useful
if you're on wifi.

Also as far as I know you can do quicktime video on the iPhone.

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agentbleu
This argument goes into some detail about the politics:

[http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/03/what-is-adobes-crystal-
ball...](http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/03/what-is-adobes-crystal-ball-saying/)

"So a taste of what’s next: As Apple jostles it out with Adobe as to whether
Flash is going to be incorporated on the iPhone we get a glimpse of what’s at
stake for all involved. Live mobile streaming is the hot potato just out of
the oven. With services such as Flixwagon and Qik setting new standards, I’m
pretty sure that the Adobe Flash’s crystal ball is telling them they need to
be at the forefront of mobile streaming.

To grease the wheels they are removing the paid license mobile operators have
been incurring worth over 50 million USD annually to Adobe to incorporate
Flash in their mobile devices and teaming up with every major player in the
market, in effect forcing Apple to play the Flash game or be left out in the
cold."

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lpgauth
I call BULLSHIT!

