
Why Flash on iPhone Does Not Make Sense - mgrouchy
http://codemonkeyism.com/flash-iphone-sense/
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dougmccune
So there are two arguments in this article. The first is that Flash makes
development and bug fixing harder because you rely on someone who is a Flash
expert to fix any bugs, and from anecdotal experience the author was working
on a team with no Flash programmers, so that was then a bottleneck. Part of
his argument then is that if you want a rich application on the iPhone you can
just make an iPhone application. Yet that has the exact same problem if you
don't have good iPhone developers in house. The argument of "this technology
is hard when you don't have programmers that know it" seems pretty ridiculous
and would even apply if I wanted to write HTML apps but my team only knew
Fortran.

The second argument is that Flash apps don't scale well to different
resolutions. As a Flash developer I think this is simply false. There's no
basis for the argument, you can make Flash apps scale in whatever way you
want, and you have completely control over nice fluid layouts (at least with
Flex you do, but you can do a lot with non-Flex Flash too).

If part of the argument is really that you don't want to have to develop
different versions of your app for different devices (in this case he worries
about resolution), then Flash is a clear winner, since that will let you
develop the same codebase that can be used across any Android/RIM/non-iPhone
phone. Sure, you'll have to rework parts of the UI to accommodate different
screen sizes, but that's just a part of mobile development. Anyone who thinks
you can design a mobile app for very different devices with different
resolutions without reworking the main UI is simply naive, regardless of
technology choice.

~~~
mortenjorck
It is indeed a rather contorted argument. I think a much better case is made
by Daniel Dilger at RoughlyDrafted:
[http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-
deve...](http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/02/20/an-adobe-flash-developer-on-
why-the-ipad-cant-use-flash/) . His contention is that Flash's mouse-heavy
interaction model and the iPad's (and the iPhone's) touch model are too
fundamentally different for a majority of the content to work, which I'm
surprised more people haven't been talking about.

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wallflower
A repost but Daniel Eran Dilger of RoughlyDrafted has a very cogent
perspective on most things Apple.

"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...

And you thought the iPhone was just Apple's way of muscling into the mobile
business! No, it’s really a proactive battle against a wide swatch of
proprietary platforms promising to plague a new wave 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)

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daok
" With different mobile phones and different resolutions, you would need to
write different Flash applications to be really usable on different resolution
phones"

Flash Application scale very easily on different screen resolution... what he
is talking about?

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dpcan
I smell fear.

The iPhone app development community must be trembling in its boots as CS5
gets closer. In just a matter of time, anyone with a computer and some
elementary Flash skills is going to have an Apple dev account and will be
submitting apps to the app store that they made in Flash.

There will be so many apps that the indie-game developer or small business
iPhone app development company won't be able to make any money because the
amount of free-app competition will be overwhelming.

Hell, it's going to suck for the consumer too. There will just be too much in
the app store. Too much crap to filter through, too many poorly built apps to
the point that downloading apps will be a chore. We'll need to try 20 before
we find one jem.

Oh the humanity. When Flash apps start entering the app store, a lot of
businesses will come crumbling down.

At least now there's the Objective-C learning-curve barrier, and you have to
have a Mac. For Android, it's Java. But Flash. Oh man, a few hundred bucks
later and anyone can create something.

I wonder how many Towers of Hanoi games the app store will have as the new
Flash developers finish their tutorials and then try to sell their app?

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smakz
You're right, Flash on iPhone doesn't make sense. specifically it doesn't make
cents for Apple.

Apple explicitly forbids electronic distribution of content in apps which
compete against iTunes. There will never be a Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Mp3
app.

Enabling Flash on the iPhone would open the doors to allowing people to watch
Hulu, Netflix, and play almost as many games they want for free. That is the
main reason why iPhone and iPad will not support Flash.

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CoryMathews
blah..

The only reason the iPhone does not support flash is so that the app store can
sell more games. If the iPhone supported flash people would make flash game
sites for the phone and apple would lose money in sales from its app store. It
would also not be able to control these games and that would make steve sad.

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acg
You can justify [almost] any decision in hindsight.

