Steve Jobs dismisses Flash for iPhone

To anyone saying that Flash is for annoying ads that suck bandwidth:

Visit Pandora.com

Flash interactivity at its best.

Or visit Geni.com

Simply couldn't be done without flash.

It is obvious to me, and other flash developers of your obvious ignorance. Flash goes way beyond banner ads and cheesy online games. It offers users a seemless, polished interface (if designed properly). Flash is powerful. Yes there are downfalls, yes there are crappy designers, yes there are bugs. But don't knock Flash until you learn how to use it.

Okay... so I'm just a sappy USER and not a developer. Not having flash on my iPhone SUCKS! There have been times in which I couldn't even register to connect to a wifi hotspot because they use Flash to do so. This may be clunky for developers but it sure doesn't seem like it's going anywhere... Apple NEEDS to find a solution here!

The question is whether Apple will look to SVG as an alternative for Flash. SVG is lightweight, open standard, and is already supported by Firefox, Opera, and Safari.

I've speculated about this on my blog. I guess will have to wait and see what happens.

Daniel
Opera Software

The new Seattle Supersonics website is 100% flash - they are making a big deal out of it, saying it's the only professional sports website that's 100% flash - needless to say, you can't view it on an iPhone.

Apple doesn't want to pay for Flash lite 3, and Adobe hasn't been willing to give it to them for free.

Apple was unable to port the Flash player themselves and have it run optimally.

The full implementation of Flash runs on Chumbys, Archos units, PSPs, and many ARM processor phones with Windows Mobile as the platform.

In other words..... Jobs is full of crap.

This may be because Jobs wants to sell applications off of Itunes and flash apps would have a few million developers able to develop and play apps free on the Iphone. Kills his business model.

I will be interested to see what the SDK press confrence brings. If Apple is charging for all iphone apps, this is why flash is not ported and probably will never be. If they are not charging for the apps, they want Adobe to pony up and pay for the port.

That's my guess. I have talked to the Mobile and Devices team at work, and that's their take. or what they are allowed to tell me. I do know that Apple wasn't a fan of paying Adobe a per device fee for Flash light, and that's what we get from every major handset manufacturer who has flash light running on their devices.

I'm a flash developer and do not agree with this move. Flash is a great product and is not going away anytime soon. Here are my two cents that others have touched upon:

I think there would be interface issues between the iphones touch gestures and how one would navigate through creative flash sites.

Apple could loose the control over the ability to sell games and other content.
It would also hurt the music/itunes end of things because of great sites like Pandora and other flash based audio/video sites. After all...its still an ipod.

I don't think I miss flash on my iphone. I'm not sure, because I can't think of anything out there that uses flash that is interesting to me that I can't get in a format that is playable on the iPhone. I like Youtube, for example, but the slice of it that Apple transcodes for us is enough for me for now. Of course, I can do without ads; and though there are many other flash video offerings that I am interested in, I can usually get all the video I can possibly watch from podcasts and other downloads that I can sync to my phone. What would be nice is the ability to subscribe to and sync podcasts to the iPhone over wireless.

There are two main issues here -- a technical one and a practical one.

Yes, Flash (either for the desktop or for mobile devices) is not great from a technical perspective. It is a memory hog and the quality is not great.

But in my view the practical issue is MORE important. Most websites employ flash whether you like it or not. So for a browser to be useful, you need to have flash. That may change in the future but we are not there yet (and may never be).

Adobe was the first in the market with a viable TRULY CROSS PLATFORM video player. And there does not seem to be a competitor. Quicktime and SilverLight etc are NOT truly cross platform as they do not support Linux and other OS.

I think Apple is just posturing. They want to pay lower royalties to Adobe to add Flash support. They also do NOT want you to play Flash games on the iPhone. The want you to pay for games for the iPhone. It could be another cash grab by Apple, a greedy company.

Can I please have the option of using Flash in my iPhone? If I like it, I'll keep it, if I don't I'll disable it. Why is Stevie-o making these decisions himself? Could it be because this is not the real internet as promised? I don't care whether Nokia or LG or Samsung or Apple can't give enough processing power in a cellphone to handle big screen graphics, they should never advertise it as being able to have the real internet while not using Flash. Regardless of what we think of Flash and its uses today, it's everywhere and one can't say that "with this car you can drive everywhere -apart from the fast lane. We feel this car won't drive well on the fast lane". That's not a car, that's a sand buggy.

All these comments seem to follow the same tone - that Flash is only good for annoying ads. Either all of the people writing the comments are sheep and are just jumping on the bandwagon, or their experience of Flash has been a negative one.

I am a Flash developer, and Flash is far more advanced than the MySpace layouts and annoying ads that clutter the net.

I create rich learning experiences and interactions using Flash. It offers the ability to create complex and immersive learning tools, which would be difficult or impossible to create using AJAX or javascript techniques.

The added advantage of being able to deploy online and to the desktop with the same file also increases the desirability of Flash.

ActionScript 3.0 also brings the ability to create full blown applications in Flash, with the possibility to actually create the Flash API in ActionScript, so it will be a self hosted platform. This all helps to merge the gap between desktop and the web.

Check out Adobe's Media Player here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/mediaplayer/install/

for an example of how powerful Flash is

My opinion could be wrong to many people, but then again that it what the comment section is for. I can't say anybody is wrong about Flash, but in my opinion it is not as bad as everybody here seems to make out.