Note About Apple, Flash, And Adobe Being Slow
One point in a Daring Fireball post worth highlighting; bold for emphasis, particularly the word “slow”:
So what Apple does not want is for some other company to establish a de facto standard software platform on top of Cocoa Touch. Not Adobe’s Flash. Not .NET (through MonoTouch). If that were to happen, there’s no lock-in advantage. … such a meta-platform would be out of Apple’s control. Consider a world where some other company’s cross-platform toolkit proved wildly popular. Then Apple releases major new features to iPhone OS, and that other company’s toolkit is slow to adopt them. At that point, it’s the other company that controls when third-party apps can make use of these features.
Apple just announced iPhone OS 4.0. Adobe has a big CS5 event Monday, implying it’s about to ship. There is no way Adobe has incorporated any iPhone 4.0 features in their Flash iPhone packager, and knowing how slow Adobe works (it took them literally years to finally get CS to Intel-only) — I wouldn’t count any of the iPhone 4.0 features getting into Flash for a long time — months if not years (seriously). I’m still waiting on bug fixes for CS4.
Apple’s stance might be better understood from the consumer’s perspective. People are going to expect iPhone 4.0 features in apps as soon as the update ships later this summer. Many of us are already chomping at the bit for iPad-specific apps. Very few will tolerate the excuse of “this app isn’t up to speed because Adobe hasn’t updated Flash yet.” Similarly, flooding the app store with tons of Flash-authored apps with no iPhone 4.0 features is going to undermine the whole point of the OS upgrade. In order for Apple to stay ahead of Android, they have to get developers incorporating iPhone 4.0 features as quickly as possible. Apple can’t afford to be held back by Adobe.
Adobe simply took too long to get CS5 shipped with this Flash packager.
I’d argue that Adobe should not have bothered with the Flash iPhone app compiler at all. They are trying to shoehorn their way onto the iPhone platform, against Apple’s and iPhone users’ wishes. Then they turn around and blame Apple when they get blocked.
Adobe should have learnedly now what all Apple developers should know. Once Apple subtly hints that they won’t support something much longer, that really means that they won’t support it much longer. When Apple announced that 64-bit apps needed to be Cocoa, Adobe pretended to be blindsided, and delayed 64-bit Photoshop for an extra year. But Apple had warned them that announcement was coming a full year in advance.
Adobe: take the hint. Apple doesn’t want you. If you want Flash to have a future in the mobile space, you first need to ship a version of Flash that doesn’t completely suck on mobiles (see the engadget JooJoo review). Then, build your own OS and your own phone, and take the iPhone on head on. We’ll see how you do. Until then, stop crying like babies.