
Why Apple Won't Allow Adobe Flash on iPhone - iamelgringo
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/11/adobe-flash-on.html
======
Arubis
Apple would be crazy to allow Flash. There's two possible outcomes that would
come from full Flash compatibility, and neither is good for AAPL:

1\. Flash is slow and clunky and sucks battery life -- much like it does on a
full-powered Mac.

2\. Flash works great and developers use it to sidestep the App Store,
bypassing both Apple's stewardship and profitability.

I've never seen any indication whatsoever (outside of hungry-for-pageviews
rumormongering) that Apple is in the least bit interested in letting Flash on
the iPhone.

~~~
nickbtard
>Flash is slow

Wrong. Badly coded flash content is slow.A bad developer churns out bad
resource hogging code. Its not Flash's fault.

~~~
Goladus
I don't care whose fault it is. The flash plugin is the only thing that ever
causes performance problems for me when browsing, and it happens _all the
time_. If it's purely a flash developer problem I'd say every single flash
developer out there is bad and churns out resource hogging code. Either that,
or it's the fault of Firefox and Chrome.

Whatever the reason, the flash plugin is a nightmare and I cannot wait to wake
up.

~~~
wensing
The real problem is that Flash is a gateway for a lot of graphic artists
wanting to make something more powerful on the web. A lot of copy-pasting and
poor practices being executed on a powerful engine with a very steep learning
curve.

By comparison, JavaScript is abused less because it's less appealing to
beginners (it lacks the wow-factor).

~~~
Goladus
I hear you but seriously, my instincts after years of troubleshooting this
kind of crap is that the problem is the plug-in itself, not the particular
developers that use it. I've seen bad javascript, hell I've seen HTML that can
cause performance problems. What's happening with flash seems to be related to
the underlying technology.

Some users are affected far more than others, and I have noticed very little
correlation between particular sites and performance problems. The only
constant seems to be: if the site uses flash (and most sites do), there's a
high chance browser CPU usage will spike to 90%+ and stay there until it is
killed. I think it happens less-often with firefox only because I've got
adblock set up and it stops a lot of it from ever being loaded.

I really don't think the symptoms would be like that if this was simply a case
of developers misusing the platform. Some sites would rarely have issues,
others would fail all the time. It's mostly a gut instinct at this point and I
could be wrong, but I don't think so.

~~~
dbrush
There is a great distinction to be observed between the words "me" and "us".

It seems as though your experience leads you to your conclusions, but I'd bet
rather confidently that your conclusions are conjectural rather than empirical
with respect to the experiences of everyone else.

~~~
Goladus
You're absolutely correct. I do not mean to say otherwise. My experiences in
this regard may not be common, but they are almost certainly not unique.

------
makecheck
The iPhone has to be concerned about power consumption, and as a general rule
unleashing interpreters is risky because it allows "unnecessary" amounts of
computation to consume power.

Consider Flash video. While it would be nice, is it the most power-efficient
way to display video? Ditto for games, or anything else that Flash is used
for.

There is also the very real problem that Flash is abused for things that
people don't want. Pointless intros, advertising, expensive animations...all
consuming CPU in a way that is largely beyond the user's control. From the
article: "websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won't work
on the iPhone"...fine by me, I have _never_ seen a site that did Flash
navigation in a way that was more useful than default web navigation (instead,
it was just...flashy).

~~~
jcl
It is unlikely that power consumption has anything to do with the restriction.
For one thing, you can write wasteful code just as easily in a compiled
language as in an interpreted language, and I have never heard of Apple
rejecting an application because it computes in a wasteful fashion.

And interpreted languages can run nearly as efficiently as compiled ones for
many user-oriented tasks, because most of the time the application is in an
idle state waiting for user input. This is why there is interpreted Java
bytecode running on _nearly every other phone_.

And the phone already interprets Javascript, which is even less efficient than
Flash. If Apple is willing to let the user choose whether or not to waste
their cycles browsing Javascript-heavy pages, why not give them the same
option to run wasteful applications?

No, this is entirely about controlling the routes of execution.

------
pg
I wonder if this limitation (not merely banning Flash, but banning
interpreters) will turn out to be the weakness that allows a competitor to one
day beat the iPhone.

There are cases where you really do want to ship code-- not merely to get
around a license restriction, but because that's the right way to build
something.

~~~
tptacek
That's going to be true exactly up to the moment when Apple reveals they've
been a button click away from enabling Flash on every iPhone, thus killing
that differentiation.

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nickbtard
This is what the Apple commercial said:

"This is not a watered down version of the Internet, or the mobile version of
the Internet, or the kinda sorta looks like the Internet Internet. It’s just
the Internet."

Unless Apple allows all plugins freely, the commercial was a lie, and Apple is
liable for misleading viewers.

If Apple is concerned about resource hungry apps burning away battery life,
they should have an inbuilt mechanism which warns users of every such
instance.The choice of avoiding Flash and saving battery life should belong to
end user.

~~~
axod
Flash is in no way the internet. Browsing the web without flash is actually a
pretty cool experience. The only thing missing is some video, which should be
fixed with the new <video> tag.

[http://ajaxian.com/archives/html5-media-support-video-and-
au...](http://ajaxian.com/archives/html5-media-support-video-and-audio-tags-
and-scriptability)

(I don't know if the iPhone supports this yet, but I'm guessing it will).

~~~
olefoo
Which codecs? That's a key question.

~~~
pistoriusp
H.264 seems to be the way ahead for now.

------
dbrush
"Don't hold your breath waiting for the iPhone to support Adobe's Flash
software: Apple's terms-of-service agreement prohibits it."

That is probably the most trivial issue preventing Flash from running on the
iPhone. Companies negotiate and renegotiate agreements all the time.

~~~
scott_s
The point they're making is that it's not a technical problem, but it violates
Apple's fundamental strategy with the iPhone.

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dejb
If this is truely their approach then the iPhone is going to start looking
like a pretty lame platform within a few years. There will be too many cool
and interesting new things out there that just don't work on it.

~~~
olefoo
This is why Android is such a big deal. Yes Apple delivered some real
innovation in UI, particularly multitouch. But by trying to enforce lock-in
they are eroding the value of their offering.

~~~
Brushfire
Agreed.

Everyone else commenting seems to be pointing out the technical hurdles /
problems with a flash installation, but they are ignoring the huge business
problem with NOT implementing it: customers want it.

Eventually, phones are going to come along that allow free apps, your own
music, flash, similar browsing experience, and a real keyboard... and smart
people will start to switch back.

In other words, the technical hurdles here are less important than the
business ones. This is Jobs trying to have his iron grip, but in the long run,
I dont see it working out.

~~~
yesimahuman
They might not sell apps/games...but that's better than not selling the phone
in the first place!

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pistoriusp
"Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the
iPhone..."

"Adobe's recent announcement that it is working on a version of Flash for
Windows Mobile..."

Which phones currently support Flash? I know a certain amount of phones
support Flashlite? And I openly welcomed Flashlite when I was dealing with
terrible mobile browsers and MIDP app development. Now? I don't particularly
care for it...

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louislouis
Hmmm what about the Youtube player on there already? Maybe that should be made
available for other FLV video sites

~~~
dbrush
Youtube re-encoded a ton of their videos for iPhone viewing. Perhaps Youtube
could offer re-encoding in the cloud or something. A proxy that does this
would probably solve the iPhone/Video argument, but it would be expensive to
implement and use in practice.

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sabat
How about just flash video?

