the.blog

The debate has been raging since the once mythic and fabled iPad was finally announced by Apple. Why has Adobe’s Flash been “banned” from these devices? The posturing over the last few weeks by the Adobe camp has been interesting to watch. We’ve seen Lee Brimelow and his now infamous grid of blue lego’s (which included a porn site originally) but this has been heartily disproven. Aside from Hulu and Farmville there are already alternatives available on the iPhone today. And there’s already been talk that Farmville for the iPhone/iPad is coming very soon.

So really, what are the possible reasons why Apple has thus far refused to include Flash on it’s mobile devices?

1. Apple wants to control the media experience completely, all media consumption should be through the iTunes experience only.

This is a fun one that keeps getting mentioned around the blogosphere. Apple is a hardware company, they want to sell units and make sure their customers have a great “experience”. If they wanted to completely shun their device users from any non-iTunes content, they would reject any apps that provided media to their users. In fact, they include a specialized YouTube app that they make nothing on with every iPhone. You can install Pandora or any number of other apps to play your music, and if Hulu had broadcast rights to mobile devices I’m sure we’d see an app in the app store tomorrow.

2. Adobe’s Flash plugin has been the source of frustration for browser crashes and general instability on OS X, and Apple wants to ensure a better “experience”.

There’s ample support for this, in Safari 4 due to the 64-bit / 32-bit split in Snow Leopard, Flash is effectively sandboxed from the rest of Safari so it doesn’t cause crashes. Even with that, I still have ClickToFlash installed and haven’t missed much at all.

What I keep hearing consistently, is that Apple won’t work with Adobe to include the Flash player on the iPhone / iPad. Supposedly Flash 10.1 is going to be installed on every single other popular smartphone (are they still called this?) out there, save for one.

Here’s what I don’t understand: if Flash 10.1 is so great, why not build a standalone app to prove it, and get it passed through the App Store? If Apple won’t approve it, make the binaries available for App Store developers, and call a press conference and show off how awesome Flash is on the iPhone, and how much it doesn’t suck. Let the internet do the rest, and Apple’s hand will be forced.

In essence Adobe, put up, or shut up.