Eric Paul Snowden

There are two companies that significantly effect the way I do my job, Apple and Adobe. The tools these companies provide make my job possible and make my life more connected. I love Illustrator, I love my iPhone, I love Photoshop, I love my Macbook, I love Lightroom and I love my iMac. Personally I’ve invested a lot of time learning Flash and continue to invest in it because I believe in the technology and where Adobe is going to take it. I think the future of Flash is (mostly) in Adobe’s hands. If they are able to innovate faster than a standard like HTML 5 they will be around for a while, and if not they won’t. Because of Apple they may loose some of their reach, but they have enough support to not go away any time soon.

There has been a war going on between Adobe and Apple for a while and Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash article is a big shot at Adobe. I agree that Apple should be able to support or not support any technology they choose, but I think there are some fundamental flaws in Steve’s letter, and I feel that he’s not genuine about his real reasons for banning the plugin.

Some thoughts on Steve’s points:

First, there’s “Open”

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc.

For the most part I agree that open is better, but Apple choses to be open or closed on a product by product basis.

First of all, the app store is an incredibly closed system. You can only use Apple computers and Apple software to create Apple only apps that Apple approves one at a time and can reject for any reason. In fact, all the content you buy from Apple (except music) is locked with their own proprietary DRM. Not to mention their own plugin Quicktime lives at the core of many Apple products.

Also, the open web is not so open as most people think. There is a patent holder for H.264 and companies like Firefox (Mozilla) have chosen not to support the codec because of this. And does anyone remember the GIF debacle of the later 90s? Saying that Apple’s web strategy is open is not really true.

There are open source tools for creating Flash content. Steve is fundamentally wrong in saying you have to go to Adobe to get tools to create Flash. Yes, you are at the mercy of Adobe’s roadmap and their plugin, but there are several great non-Adobe tools for creating Flash content.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

My problem with the full web argument is a problem I often have with Steve, he doesn’t have to live in the real world. Apple is so focused on big brands like YouTube, ABC etc who have the time, manpower and money to simply shift from FLV to H.264 they don’t realize the impact this will have on many of their customers. This shift is a huge endevor for many large brands, and next to impossible for medium and small companies. People will make it happen, but to expect it to be as simple as flipping a switch shows a pretty big lack of understanding of the realities of their customers. Steve seems to think having big video partners on board is good enough, but how does shutting out smaller companies align itself with the open web, or the general tenants of the web at all?

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.

Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

I agree with most of Steve’s points here. Hopefully Flash 10.1 rectifies a lot of this but honestly Adobe has been dragging their feet on mobile for years and Apple has now leapfrogged them.

Fourth, there’s battery life.

The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

This one is hilarious. We all know Steve uses an iPhone but I wonder what model he has. 10 hours? I’m lucky to get 5 with heavy use. I rarely make it through a work day without needing to plug in and I have push messages turned off and all my mail set to fetch manually. That said I don’t want any technology draining my battery faster and this is a legitimate concern.

I also agree about video needing hardware acceleration, but Apple just opened up hardware acceleration to third parties on the Mac, why couldn’t they do that on mobile? This is a limitation Apple has put in place, which again is their decision, but it’s unfair to position it as another companies shortcoming.

Fifth, there’s Touch.

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Again, a totally reasonable point, but I’d rather have a bad Flash experience than none at all. And this only pertains to mobile web and not apps, where Flash does support multi-touch and apps would be built with this in mind.

Whether it’s a good idea to build all Flash sites or not is moot. Again, it’s a reality. People build all Flash sites and consumers should be able to access that content via a mobile device.

Sixth, the most important reason.

It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms.

I think Steve misses the point here. It’s not about getting Apple devs to use Flash, it’s about allowing Flash devs to have another outlet for their skills. I find it hard to believe any native app developer would move to a third party to create apps. Native development will always be superior, Steve is definitely right about this, but sometimes in the real world easier trumps better. Developers should be able to make that decision on their own and ultimately if Flash is slow to iterate like Steve suggests developers will make a different decision.

Final Thoughts.

In the end I think most people familiar with this space have always known that Flash is never coming to the iPhone. This is a business decision that Apple has a right to make, but I think their reasons for making the decision, and the reasons outlined in this article are not the same. There are some valid points here, some I fundamentally disagree with, and a few I think are incorrect.

Ultimately I hope Apple sees what this latest battle is all about, developers want more/easier ways to build for their platform. They want choice in tools and language and they don’t want to be forced to hire an engineer or spend 6 months learning Objective C to benefit from this amazing new ecosystem. Hopefully Apple is listening.