Irish Web Developer

Over the last number of weeks, there has been a war of words between Adobe and Apple about the availability of the Flash player on Apple’s products such as the iPhone and iPad.

I have to say I think Apple’s behavior in this has been appalling. The only reason that Apple are doing this is for money. If they allowed the flash player on these devices, developers could make applications available to users without the need to provide them through the app-store and thus deny apple their cut.

According to Steve Jobs, Adobe Flash is a closed proprietary, whereas Apple is all about the open-source with Webkit. That’s great, but Webkit has nothing to do with this debate.

The Adobe Flash platform is a lot more open than Apple’s mobile platform. Let’s compare them.

To develop an iPhone application I can use xcode, Apple’s development environment, that’s it nothing else. To create a swf file that runs in the flash player I can use haxe, flash develop or fdt. There are loads more and none of these come from Adobe.

Once you have created my application, it doesn’t get any better. To make an iphone application available to the public, a developer has to pay a fee of $99. This fee allows developers to submit their application for the appstore. First, however, it has to be reviewed by Apple. This review process has resulted in a lot of denials and not just apps made by small independent developers. Google have had at least 2 apps denied, Google Voice and Google Latitude when they submitted them to the app store. On the other hand, once you have created an application on the flash platform you can share it however you wish.

Steve Jobs states performance as one of the reasons why xcode is the only dev environment allowed. This makes the assumption that if developers use something other than xcode, the apps will not perform as well. In that case, why not let these apps be developed on different platforms and add performance to the review process. That way, apps that are badly written on xcode are caught as well.

From a technology point of view, it doesn’t really make any sense. There are loads of developers out there who create great apps. Why is Apple forcing them to use their tools?

But lets look at it from Apple’s point of view. Why should they let the Flash on their products? There is absolutely no reason why they should. It just means that users will have less choice. They can only install apps from the app store. They are creating a closed system and history has shown that when a closed system challenges a open system, the open system always wins.

I love Apple’s products, I’m using a MacBook to write this post, but at the moment if someone offered me the choice between an iPhone or a Google Nexus One Android phone, I’d have to go with the Nexus One.

Tell someone about it:

Finally you can buy and rent movies in the itunes store. No TV shows yet though. I think it might be time to look at buying an apple tv.

Tell someone about it: