There was another development in Steve Jobs’ war on Flash today, as Adobe told the government that banning this technology on devices like the iPhone and iPad could hurt its business.
“To the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed,” Adobe said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange commission.
Adobe has long said it wants to be on the iPhone but Jobs won’t allow it – the dude even took a jab at Adobe during the iPhone 4.0 unveiling by saying a rich media ad was made with HTML5. He says his main beef is sluggish performance but I have a sneaking suspicion that he doesn’t want the wealth of Flash content online to challenge the App Store. Apple’s not backing down either, as it recently changed its terms of service to not allow developers to use Flash compilers to create iPhone apps. Apple’s platform has so much momentum that many major publishers are living with the no-Flash environment in order to reach this highly-coveted demographic.
To be fair, Flash has sucked on phones for a while but the company has been working hard to get it up to snuff. Flash 10.1 should hit nearly every major smartphone platform except for the iPhone OS and it will likely include hardware acceleration for rock-solid performance. As you can see in the video below, Flash can work pretty well on the Nexus One.
Will Apple eventually cave to the pressure? I sincerely doubt it. Jobs just doesn’t seem to like the technology and there are no signs he wants to open up the iPhone OS to all comers.
Update: Adobe’s fighting mad about the change in Apple’s terms of service, according to a post on the Flash blog. The blog author thinks the move is a slap in the face to developers and that Apple is willing to abuse its loyal users and “make them pawns for the sake of trying to hurt another company.” The best part’s at the end:
“Now let me put aside my role as an official representative of Adobe for a moment as I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment,” wrote blog author Lee Brimelow. “Go screw yourself Apple”
[Via Business Week]