Adobe versus Apple: The Flash saga continues
- 02 September, 2011 12:26
- Comments 4
Adobe has claimed that Apple's decision to bar Flash from all iOS devices is related to its business plan, and not to technical concerns.
Australia and New Zealand's Adobe evangelist, Paul Burnett, told Computerworld Australia that Apple’s decision has nothing to do with the quality of Adobe products.
“At the moment Flash doesn’t run in the browser of iOS [devices] and this is the only platform it doesn’t run on — I can’t see that changing at the moment,” Burnett said.
“The reasoning [behind] Apple’s decision to put it on there or not have been to do with [Flash] performance, that it chews up the CPU and is buggy, but that’s been proved wrong quite clearly by Android and the [RIM] PlayBook where Flash is running really, really smoothly with positive feedback from users.”
Burnett said rather than being a technical issue, Apple’s choice stems from its desire to keep its business model intact.
“The reason that Apple doesn’t want it is because its a threat to the iTunes store and their business model, and that makes perfect sense for them, and that’s why I don’t think its going to change in the near future.”
Burnett’s claims come as Adobe announced it would launch a pre-release build of Adobe Reader for the iPad, in a move intended to create equality across the mobile market.
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Comments
Patrick Bay
Sadly, this is something that many Flash developers have been saying for nearly as long. The problem is that folks like Jobs (who doesn't even know how to program!), and his marketing department are given so much lip service that their shrieking rebuttals often end up overwhelming reality or truth of any kind.
I'd suggest that people looking to find the truth behind a specific technology go directly to the people who actually work with it. User experience is one thing, that's subjective, but many objective aspects these days are being pushed aside with statements that are tantamount to lies. Jobs' statement about Flash is still available on the Apple site and, as this article adroitly describes, there are numerous tablets and phones out there that shows that the statement is just so much hot air. It doesn't mention Apple's profit margins and instead focuses on technical malarkey which was wrong almost from the moment it was written by Jobs.
Jay Vanian
If the issue was purely performance-related, Apple could easily allow the plugin, but give users a convenient option to disable.
It's all just business; consumers are the casualties in this tech war.
Zacko
I can tell you that as a long time Flash developer (since 2002) Flash is a resource hog. Anytime you run the Flash Player the CPU spikes considerably on a computer. On a laptop, not plugged in, I can see the battery life cut in half by running Flash based content. If you look at the battery tests between all the tablets, the iPad is the clear winner. This is in part due to the strictness of the code that apps are written in (compiled vs just-in-time) as well as other things Apple has done to streamline the resource usage on small devices.
I won't diagree that there is some level of 'marketing' going on here, but don't think for one second that Adobe isn't guilty of this too. They have been made aware of what they can do to streamline their player technology (even before iOS), they just won't do it. So I think both sides of this are playing games with the consumer caught in the middle.
I will also say this about the entire argument: HTML5 and a plugin free browser environment is where we should be headed. The quicker we can stop relying on 3rd party plugins to serve content the happier we all will be. HTML5 is the future of web based applications, not Flash.
Walter Adamson
You mean the thing that jams up my Chrome browser every single day and hogs memory and CPU. Glad Apple made the decision they did.
Re the last past of the article, there are already many PDF readers on the iPad, I think it's the Adobe CreatePDF application which they are launching.
Walter @adamson
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