APPLE V. FLASH: FORWARD VS BACKWARD LOOKING
Recently there was a lot of talk about Apple not supporting Flash in the iPad. Moreover, there were articles in the press stating that Steve Jobs said Adobe was “lazy” when developing Flash. Those remarks were the cue for Adobe to enter the field and hit by saying that Apple has created a closed platform that can only be governed by them. Basically most of the opinion articles around the web either say that Apple is right because Flash apps would crash the iPhone/iPad or that Adobe is right because it is the user’s device and he can do whatever he wants with it. If we try to understand each company’s policies, and market behavior, we can see how they reached this situation. Apple is a company that is forward looking, there are tiny compromises in terms of compatibility. This was proven over time like when the iMac shipped without a floppy disk or the Macbook Air without an optical one. Not only that but most of Mac OS releases only worked with a limited amount of older computers. This means that Apple is always trying to bring the best possible experience to the user regardless of what is out there. Flash is proven to be less than optimum in the Mac and you can only imagine how it would look like in the iPhone. So they just decided not to support it. Adobe, in the other hand, always tries to be compatible across the board. Flash, a technology that Adobe bought from Macromedia, was developed to bring compatibility, and extended features, to the web. It is definitively not an easy task to be compatible with every platform out there, kudos to Adobe on that, but the compromise they need to do in order to bring Flash to every device almost ruins the user experience in some. Furthermore, there are news today that Adobe wants to bring it’s AIR system to different platforms on the mobile space so developers can have one version of their app that works across the board. As a user it’s frustrating that I cannot see Hulu on my iPhone but it is not pleasant seeing my CPU hitting 100% when I am watching it on my Mac. That is why, in my opinion, new standards of web technology are needed that work on every device that supports them so there is no need for an artificial abstraction layer that compromises speed and reliability in terms of compatibility.
