— The bickering between Apple and Adobe over why Apple’s iPhone and its
new iPad don’t run Adobe’s Flash software is giving me a headache.
Apple CEO
Adobe’s chief technology officer, denies that and accuses Apple of
trying to control what iPhone and iPad users can do with their devices.
Jobs says Flash is on its way out. No way, says Lynch.
Enough already. You guys are beginning to remind me of my kids. Can’t you find some way to get along?
It seems to me that Apple and Adobe need each other.
Even if they didn’t, the millions of us who own iPhones and iPod
touches or who plan to buy an iPad when the new multimedia tablet hits
the market need them to work things out. Because we’re the ones who are
going to lose out if they don’t.
Adobe’s Flash is a software program that plugs into
a Web browser to deliver multimedia content such as games, videos and
interactive advertisements. Adobe says the vast majority of top Web
sites include Flash content and that 75 percent of the video on the Web
is delivered using Flash.
Flash has mostly been a PC experience, because Flash
players either haven’t been available on smartphones or weren’t
powerful enough to access much of the Flash content on the Web.
Until now, the lack of Flash on the iPhone hasn’t
been that big of a deal. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, the browsing
experience was so much better than what came before it on mobile phones
that it was hard to complain that it didn’t support Flash. It was great
just to be able to access the Web and full HTML pages. And because
other smartphones also lacked Flash support, iPhone users didn’t feel
they were missing something.
That’s about to change. Through an initiative called the
Adobe is revamping Flash to allow consumers to access by smartphone
almost all multimedia content they can get on a PC. By the end of June,
the company expects to have Flash version 10.1 available for a wide
range of smartphones, including Palm’s webOS phones,
IPhone users may not have worried much that their
phones can’t simultaneously run more than one application like other
smartphones. But they soon may be unhappy that their phone can’t access
the videos and games that other phones can.
IPad owners may be even more unhappy. One thing
people will want to do with Apple’s new tablet device is access Web
content. But if they can’t watch a video on Hulu, play a game on
Facebook or even look up ticket information for
Apple says consumers often can download a native
application that does the same thing as Flash. YouTube, for example,
uses Flash to deliver its videos to PC Web browsers, but its iPhone app
lets users watch those videos without Flash.
But not every Web site has created an app — nor
should they have to. And even those that have often discovered that
their iPhone apps can’t interact easily with their Flash-based
applications on the Web.
While Apple enjoys a huge lead in applications
available for the iPhone, Flash support could help its competitors
level the playing field. With Flash, those devices could offer games,
videos and other content not available on the iPhone.
Mind you, I’m not discounting Jobs’ complaints about
Flash. Adobe’s Lynch himself acknowledged that Flash has typically run
faster in Microsoft Windows than in Apple’s Macintosh OS, from which
the iPhone OS is derived. I’ve seen numerous comments from
rank-and-file Mac users that Flash slows down their machines and makes
them unstable. So it would seem that Adobe does need to improve Flash
for Apple devices.
But Jobs’ assertion that Apple doesn’t need to
support Flash because it’s on the way out is premature at best. While a
new version of the language used to code Web pages does include
Flash-like multimedia capabilities, the standard for doing that is
still being hashed out. With only a fraction of Web surfers using
browsers that can translate the language’s new capabilities, few Web
publishers are using them yet.
So Apple needs to support Flash in the iPhone OS —
or risk losing customers to other platforms that do. And Adobe needs
Apple to support Flash — or it will risk Flash losing favor with
developers and advertisers who use the technology to deliver their
content and want to reach those millions of iPhone owners.
But most of all, we iPhone OS users need Apple and Adobe to work things out. Because we’ll be missing out until they do.
—
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