| 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.
3. Apple is the new Microsoft.
Word that both the Dept. of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are looking into possible anti-trust inquiries related to Apple’s refusal to accept apps not based on its own developer tools came from a thinly sourced story in The New York Post, not exactly a bastion of authoritative tech news. And, let’s face it, Apple is hardly Microsoft, which generated a long, costly, and ultimately stalemated anti-trust battle that the federal government has little appetite to repeat.
And Microsoft controlled a far larger portion of the PC operating-system market than Apple controls of the smartphone market today. Although the iPhone was the fastest-growing smartphone in the first quarter of this year, it still ranks No. 3 in the world.
The iPhone’s share of the global smartphone market surged in the last year, according to a recent report from IDC. But it still represents only 16.1 percent in the first quarter of 2010.
Nokia controls almost 40 percent of the smartphone market. The iPhone is wildly popular, particularly with tech-savvy, fashion-conscious, affluent users. But it’s hardly a monopoly product.
4. This is about next-generation technology.
This is the crux of Jobs’ argument: Flash is yesterday’s technology, “created during the PC era – for PCs and mice.” The future belongs to HTML5, “the new Web standard that …lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins.”
Even worse, said Jobs, Flash is a “a cross platform development tool.” Oh, the horror!
Here Jobs inadvertently reveals his true motivation: to keep the iPhone garden walled. He’s right to say that HTML5, along with the video codec H.264, will eventually become the de facto standard for creating video, animation, and interactive apps for both mobile and laptop devices. The key term in that sentence is “eventually.” In fact, Flash remains a widely accepted, versatile tool for developers that happens to also support HTML5. Beta versions of Flash version 10.1 include support for touchscreen devices. Millions of developers are busy creating Flash-based applications that will run not only on non-Apple smartphones but on tablets and ultra-mobile computers as well.
“Flash support on Windows-based netbooks and tablets is another story,” pointed out Avi Greengart, mobile and wireless analyst at Current Analysis. “There it is just one of several huge differences between Apple’s vision of tablets and rivals’.”
5. This is a minor squabble between two prideful tech CEOs.
It’s not; it’s a debate over the future of the mobile Web. Going back to Lynch’s remarks this week, it’s clear that Apple, which has made billions with its genius for product design, intuitive user interfaces, and slick marketing, is every bit as wedded to a walled-garden vision of mobile devices as are the major U.S. carriers. That’s working grandly now, and Jobs is well aware that he can afford to continue to ban Flash on his mobile devices and keep the iPhone/iPad platform proprietary.
Eventually, though, as Jobs himself wrote in his anti-Flash manifesto, “open standards created in the mobile era … will win on mobile devices.” |
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