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Steve Jobs speaks out on Adobe Flash

by Scott Bicheno on 29 April 2010, 15:21

Tags: Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE)

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Sixth, the most important reason

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn't support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but 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. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple's platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

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.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era - for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards - all areas where Flash falls short.

The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple's mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple's App Store proves that Flash isn't necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

 



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Steve Jobs is such a hypocrite. I don't buy their “standards” should be open.

Apple is such a closed system (almost EVERYTHING!), it's amazing and they are using the same argument against Flash.
More apps on the iPhone Os platform?

erm except for the flash platform, java platform, oh and that WINDOWS platform.

quite a few pages designed to hide his argument that flash is web only, its not, AIR is marking the divergence. The more toolsets offered to end users, the more environments offered to devs the better.

That way I can bitch about how much I hate Java when I'm having to use Java, or Flash when I'm not wanting to watch a cartoon etc.
Maybe there's a good side to it though - it might encourage people to move away from flash for streaming video towards HTML5 for example because flash is a really poor performer in comparison to plain video. For example it maxes out lots of CPUs on Youtube especially for HD on systems which can play standard 1080p videos without breaking into a sweat and the Linux port is even worse unfortunately. And it effects things like iPlayer, I get the feeling it's just the lazy option for developers now even though there are far better options out there. And that's not to mention the constant security flaws being found in it, most of which are very serious and often effect more than just Windows. No, I'm with Apple on this one, albeit not for the same reasons…
funny how you never heard apple complain about adobe when it came to photoshop. god knows how much apple made off the ‘photoshop runs so well on macs, its every photgraphers choice’ myth.
Love how Jobs just admitted that Macs crash, doesnt bode well for their advertising now…. “Macs crash because of Flash, windows crashes about the same”.

Hypocrites they all are, Flash is good and bad and it is open as it allows Java and flash to compete but noooo Its closed cause Jobs said so and Apple OS so isnt closed when its taken over a year to get a different browser to safari lol.