After all the hype this morning and the delivery of the iPhone OS 4.0 preview there were some interesting posts and comments made about the Apple v. Flash debate.
Conspiracy theories and thoughts about why Apple don’t want Flash on the iPhone range from the rational to the big company domination points of view. I see myself being more rational about these theories. Some I have come across don’t seem right.
Adobe want to lock developers into Flash and commoditize everything else as Flash-delivery devices. Apple want to commoditize applications and lock developers into their APIs.
via YCominator Comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1250946
I put this comment in the “big company domination” conspiracy category. Sure Apple is a big company that has a lot of control over technology and the mobile space. However, just because they are big doesn’t mean they are evil.
Iv’e said it many times why Flash and the iPhone OS don’t mix, it comes down to performance. In the keynote this morning Steve made a key point of why they don’t use Flash, in an indirect manner.
Whilst demoing the iAd service he mentioned that the Ad’s when you opened them are HTML5 and are animated with effects. The preview showed off some pretty good animations with effects like shadows and light sources. I believe this is the reason that Flash isn’t on the iPhone, HTML5 does it better.
Why would Apple go and get in bed with Adobe when it can use true open standards and use a language that the native OS can support and optimise. Plus lets not forget that to generally build Flash executables you need Flash CS5 and that costs money when a text editor and some knowledge can get you a HTML5 page for free.
In closing, what Apple is doing is supporting HTML5 which is a more open standard plus it’s free to develop and can be controlled by the system for better performance. Simple as that.
Edit: I skewed off at the end a little bit. When mentioning HTML5 I was talking about why the iAd service uses HTML5 for making Adverts. I combined 2 bits of rage I had at the time of posting this. But at the beginning I think I was clear in saying that the views that Apple is trying to dominate are the ramblings of idiots. Its more a case of Apple looking after the user and making sure their experience is free of flaws and bugs in turn selling more devices thanks to verbal referrals from HAPPY users.
