Adobe Made Their Move, Now It's Apple's Turn
August 29th, 2007
Despite the speculative bullshit that always seems to spout from Walt Mossberg and Robert Scoble’s mouths, we still don’t really know what’s driving Apple’s decision to not support Flash content on the iPhone. They’ve also removed the Flash content from their website, which leads me to believe that this issue runs far deeper than I previously thought.
Adobe’s recent announcement of H.264/AAC support (among other things) in their Flash Player 9 product, has overnight turned Adobe’s Flash Player and Apple’s Quicktime Player into competing products. If you read between the lines, however, you might see something interesting:
“Adobe has licensed the x86, PowerPC and ARM versions of MainConcept’s H.264 and AAC decoders”
Keyword, “ARM”. Previously, Adobe have not had a Flash Player 9 SDK for the ARM architecture. For this reason, products like the Opera Browser on the Nintendo Wii have needed to settle for Flash Player 7, or in the case of Apple’s iPhone they’ve decided not to settle at all and instead ignored support for Flash altogether. Now, it seems that Adobe might be planning on releasing an SDK for the ARM architecture since the H.264/AAC support only affects the version 9 product.
Once Adobe releases an SDK, Apple will have the means to support the plugin on the iPhone. As an added benefit, they won’t need to worry about licencing On2’s VP6 codec since the H.264 videos which currently play on the iPhone, iPod and iTV will also play within the Flash Player too. Not only that, but the annoucement from Adobe also mentions support for reading iTunes metadata (“list” atom) embedded in audio and video files.
Adobe are playing straight into Apple’s hands!
So what’s Apple going to do about it? Should they embrace these changes and welcome Adobe with open arms? Keep in mind that according to the Adobe FAQ, “new releases of Flash Player take approximately 12 months to reach 90% penetration”. We’ll see this Flash Player in the wild as a release version sometime in September, so I expect Apple to have at least polarised by then.
I honestly hope that they chose to support the Flash Player. By doing so, they will put the power back in the hands of the content providors. While this doesn’t mean I expect them to re-instate Flash content on their own website, at least we’ll be left with a choice in the matter.
January 27th, 2009 at 05:47 PM
Hmm, 2009 and still no flash.
I’m yet to see a truly cogent argument as to why neither flash nor Java are supported on the iPhone, even though both are now well supported on the ARM architecture.
Ruling out technical concerns, the best argument I’ve heard so far is that by limiting these platforms, Apple is effectively locking anyone who wishes to develop iPhone apps to two VMs, JavaScript and iPhoneOS (and JavaScript is probably only there via Safari, and thus limited to fairly basic web-apps).
Naturally this is disappointing for iPhone developers, especially since this means anyone developing for mobile needs to treat each OS (Symbian, iPhone, Android etc.) essentially separately.
This might seem foolish on Apple’s part – if they weren’t such a major and high profile player. Typically development teams (particularly those working on ‘edge’ technologies like mobile products) can typically only afford to tackle one platform at a time, and so will typically go for the lowest hanging fruit – the iPhone.
So, if true, the strategy while very Gatesian has played out well for Apple, which comfortably has the biggest ecosystem of 3rd party applications, despite being a relatively new player, and probably at the expense of the Symbian and Android platforms. And as a bonus, it’s forced a lot of developers (including me) to cough up for a Mac that’s capable of running the iPhone SDK and start making the effort to grips with Cocoa…
February 11th, 2009 at 03:53 PM
@J-So: I think it’s pretty clear why Flash & Java aren’t available on the iPhone – they don’t solve any problems that aren’t solved by Mobile Safari or the iPhone SDK.
You mention that Apple is “effectively locking” people into their own platform – that’s not entirely true. They provide one open platform (the web) and one closed platform (the SDK). If they introduced two more closed platforms (Java & Flash), what does anyone gain?
If a Flash developer has rejected the web for so long that they’re incapable of writing web applications for Webkit, that’s their fault. Java developers are already used to not being able to write applications for certain phones, likewise Symbian developers. So what’s really new? People & businesses are plagued by inertia – you can’t save them from themselves.
Keep in mind that your choice to buy a Mac and learn Cocoa is a choice, not an imposition. While it’s not particularly “cool” to write offline Webkit applications using the HTML5 storage and manifest stuff Apple has included in Mobile Safari, it most definitely does open up Webkit-enabled devices to you.
Apple have placed their bets on the web, probably due in some part to the failures of Flash & Java as content-platforms (device fragmentation, vendor lock-in etc.). I don’t think you can fault them for that.