The fight between Adobe and Apple, over the lack of support for Flash applications on the iPhone and iPad, continued on May 6 with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch responding, at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, to Steve Jobs’ anti-Flash screed on the Apple Web site.
Jobs’ refusal to allow Flash-based apps on Apple’s popular mobile devices "is totally counter to the Web,” Lynch declared, according to InformationWeek. “Apple is playing this strategy where they apparently want to create a walled garden about what applications people can use."
Since this high-tech throwdown started, thousands of words have been written about Flash, the iPhone, and the future of mobile video. And thanks largely to the large megaphone owned by Steve Jobs, several misconceptions have arisen. Below, we examine five of those.
1. This is a quality of experience issue.
That’s what Steve Jobs would have you believe. In his blog post, he went on at length about how buggy Flash is, how it “has not performed well on mobile devices,” it’s “the number one reason Macs crash,” it drains batteries rapidly, and so on.
To be sure, Flash does have some security and reliability issues. But James R. Borck, former manager of the InfoWorld Test Center, concluded in a review for CIO Magazine that, "Technically, Flash is a solid and well-designed content delivery platform that has continuously evolved to keep stride with a rapidly maturing Web ecosystem."
And make no mistake: Jobs’ primary concern here is not bugginess, or the fact that Flash was not designed to run on touchscreen devices. It’s money.
“There are legitimate technical reasons to block Flash applications on the iPhone and iPad,” acknowledged Grant Kirkwood, CTO at Packet Exchange, a provider of IP peering and interconnection services. “But those are very easily overcome.”
The fact is that Apple works with third-party developers all time, to adapt those applications to the iPhone platform so they work seamlessly. Shouting about how poorly Flash performs, Kirkwood stated, is “a thinly veiled excuse” to do what Jobs really wants to do, which is keep the iPad a closed, proprietary platform wherein every application is native to the device and every time a user pays for something, Apple gets a cut. If Flash were available on the iPhone, why would users buy an app when they could surf the Flash-based Web for free?
2. Adobe will give in and produce “Flash for the iPhone.”
If the comments of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen are any indication, Adobe is just as entrenched in this battle as Jobs’ Apple. And Adobe, which had $2.9 billion in revenues in 2009, makes only a fraction of its money on Flash.
“If Adobe Flash loses market share to alternative solutions, such as HTML5, which Jobs is promoting,” Avian Securities senior analyst Jeff Gaggin told VON/xchange in an email, “then Adobe could see risk to their Flash business. But it’s well less than 5 percent of total revenues for Adobe.”
Flash has been the lingua franca for Web-based video for many years. Adobe has little incentive to cave in to Jobs’ demands, and there’s no indication it will do so.