why apple won't support flashSteve Jobs slams Flash, says it's a proprietary, security and battery-challenged relic
So that's how Steve Jobs thinks about Adobe and Flash.
In a scathing letter, Apple CEO Jobs lays out six reasons why Apple won't support Flash technology on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch saying it hasn't kept pace with the modern low-battery touch world of mobile. Stepping back, Jobs details a larger rift between long-time partners Apple and Adobe, saying the two have "grown apart" and share few joint interests.
This is a systematic take-down of arguments that Adobe and many Flash supporters and developers have thrown out recently following Apple's decision to not support Flash on its mobile devices and more recently, not allow iPhone OS developers to use Flash-based cross platform development tools.
Mike Chambers, Adobe's principal product manager laid out his concerns in a blog post earlier this month explaining why Adobe won't be investing any more in its iPhone development tools. He said Apple's decision to ban Flash was an effort to lock in developers inside a walled garden and prevent them from writing titles that can easily appear on multiple platforms.
Jobs said the his beef with Flash comes down to six points:
-He said Flash is proprietary and while Apple has its own closed products, it supports open web standards such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript.
-Apple is encouraging many websites to encode in H.264, which can be seen on the iPhone and iPad's Safari browser. He said while Flash games won't work on the iPhone OS, he said there are 50,000 games in the App Store.
-Flash has security problems and is the number one cause for Mac crashes, Jobs said. He said Adobe still hasn't shown Flash can work well on a mobile device.
-Flash is a battery hog which doesn't work well with mobile devices, said Jobs. He said users can get twice the battery life watching H.264 videos than Flash video.
-Jobs said as mobile goes to touch, Flash isn't designed to support it. That would force many developers to re-write sites. So why not make the move to HTML5 then, he asks.
And finally, Jobs said most importantly, he's opposed to allowing developers to use Flash to create iPhone apps because it results in "sub-standard apps" and can slow the pace of app development to when Adobe updates its developer tools. He said Adobe's goal to enable cross-platform apps would lead to apps that don't take full advantage of the iPhone OS' strengths.
In closing, Jobs said Flash is a product of the PC era but has not evolved for mobile. "...the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards - all areas where Flash falls short," Jobs wrote. "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."
Waiting on an official response from Adobe.