Beats, Apps, & Gfx

Why don’t Apple mobile-devices have Flash? Flash abounds on the web, extends to the desktop, and is branching out to mobile devices, tablets, including TV’s. Steve Jobs thinks the issue is popular enough to post a full-length article on apple.com, and we’re not buying any of it.

First

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system. Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

This isn’t a reason to ditch web-plugins. Flash is proven capable of advancing rapidly beyond what the HTML standards committee has produced, still to this day.

Apple claimed itself as proprietor of the HTML canvas element in ’07. “WebKit forwarded an email from Apple’s Patent Counsel which stated that Apple reserved all intellectual property rights relative to WHATWG’s canvas, but left the door open to licensing the patents should the specification be transferred to a standards body with a formal patent policy.” H.264 also isn’t open, it’s owned by MPEG LA who said, “Internet Video that is free to end users would continue to be exempt from royalty fees until at least Dec 2015“.

Hypocritical of Steve, don’t you think?

Flash isn’t as closed as he insinuates. Flash developers are not required to submit their apps to Adobe for inspection & rejection, it’s a completely open platform in that regard. Top iPhone developers have protested & left the platform due to Apple’s closed app-store policies. Much of Flash is open, including the specs for flash video FLV, the file format SWF, the binary exchange format AMF, and the protocol used for transmission of audio, video, and data RTMP are all published and can be downloaded. The Flex SDK is open & freely available. The compiler is open source. Hell, even the Virtual Machine is open.

Second

Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. Almost all of this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

This sounds like a sales-pitch more than an explanation, but I see what Steve’s saying; Apple doesn’t need Flash in it’s business model & was able to profit greater without competition. Being the first to launch a successful touch-product Apple had enough leverage to mandate pretty much any requirements for entry. Publishers would’ve bent over backwards to get in on the first successful smartphone action, and in ways they did. Some ponied up cash, time, & resources to develop alternative sites just for iDevices. If every device manufacturer follows this precedent, how many times are publishers going to develop platform-specific apps, and alternate versions of their sites to accomodate splintered visions of the web? Is Apple the sole high-maintenance trist that devolves into a high-cost pain in the port? There’s a long list of members on the open-screen project including Google, Verizon, Nokia, Motorla, Sony, Intel, HTC, NVIDIA, NBC, New York Times, MTV, Lionsgate, Disney, Comcast, Cisco, BBC, ARM, AMD, and more. Where’s Apple?

Third

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance. Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Hold on, this one has a shocking surprise in it..

“Symantec documented 321 holes affecting browser plug-ins last year: 134 for ActiveX, 84 for Java SE, 49 for Adobe Reader, 27 for QuickTime, 23 for Flash Player, and 4 for Firefox extensions. Meanwhile, Safari had 94 new vulnerabilities.-CNET“

WAIT A SECOND! Who makes QuickTime & Safari?! Steve’s own product was more vulnerable throughout 2009. Steve? The report also says Safari had 4x as many vulnerabilites and of all the browsers took the longest averaged time to fix them. Flash is more secure than Safari & Quicktime.

Whereas Apple has been inventing reasons to stir anti-Flash sentiment, Google has taken an honest approach. They’ve updated the browser-plugin model, which was drafted in the days of Netscape. Remember Netscape? Yeah it’s old. Google Chrome integrates plugins more closely to the browser. This means that Flash will be more secure because users will always be on the most current version of the Flash Player. Google will automatically be handling updates to Flash in the background, similar to OS X’s Software Update. Bravo Google. Apple… don’t be evil.

The iDevices have over 150,000 public issues/complaints logged at Apple’s support forum. Over 9,000 are under the internet/networking section. There are 51 million iPhones in use today. In contrast, Flash Player has only 7,000, and Flash Player is installed on 99% of internet-enabled computers. People in expensive touch-screen houses shouldn’t throw stones.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Really? Adobe’s been pretty openly sharing footage of 10.1 betas.

It looks pretty damn performant to me!! Does Steve even care?

Fourth

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained. When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Again, this isn’t really a reason to exclude Flash. Sure, it’s a call for improvement, but it’s a very personal choice that should be decided by the publisher & user, not Steve Jobs. There are plenty of ways to drain the phone’s battery (without Flash) in under 5 hours.

Here’s a video showing the battery-usage of Flash 10.1, it’s looking pretty good isn’t it?

Fifth

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on ‘rollovers’, which pop-up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript? Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

See how wrong Steve is with your own eyes…

The app will just work on both the touch-device, and the mouse-device. If in some unique case your implementation of mouse-over doesn’t translate well to touch-devices, it would require exponentially more time & resources to convert an entire site from Flash to HTML than it would to simply change the site’s “onMouseOver show popupMenu” to “onTouchDown show popupMenu”. In fact, on touch-interfaces Flash automatically translates the mouse-down, mouse-up, and click events as touch-events, requiring no refactoring. Steve’s distorting the truth… Nice work you “lazy” Adobe engineers! ; )

Sixth

Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices. We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms. Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Intermediary layers produced Ableton Live, Firefox, and many other apps I’m sure none of us are even aware of. Pretending that Intermediary layers result in poorer apps is like pretending that native tools guarantee a great app.

I promise you Flash iPhone apps are performing great on my iPhone 3G, much better on 3GS, and insanely well on the iPad. But we can’t play in Steve’s playground? What an apphole ; )

Using Apple’s language/API, instead of an intermediary layer is only advantageous is some cases, not all. It’s spurious to suggest that whenever Apple adds a new API to the platform that all apps are going to need to use it, especially if it involves considerable alteration to an existing product. Some apps just need to slosh beer around in a glass in response to the accelerometer, emit bodily noises & instrument sounds, or connect to online social services & bring people together with simple puzzle games. Which can & have been done beautifully using Flash & other 3rd party tools/languages.

I’d argue that they can be done better in Flash because Adobe’s design & development tools are better than Xcode & InterfaceBuilder, especially at rapidly building custom interfaces.

Instead of blocking 3rd party dev-tools like Flash, Apple should implement 3rd party standards which companies like Adobe are required to adhere to ( like the developer license ). Apple’s goal is to block cross-platform development, but attempting to beautify the decision with platitude & subterfuge is a shame.

Say it how it is Apple, “Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers. We won’t let them use tools/languages that allow for cross-platform development. We won’t lift a finger to get Flash onto our products, in fact we’re going to spread disinformation about it. We’re going to use every advantage possible to benefit our iTunes content-distribution model & make it more difficult for publishers to distribute content on our competitor’s products. We’re Apple, have it our way or we’ll brick your phone & raid your house while you’re out for dinner.”