Flash On The iPhone - Who Is Stopping It?

I don’t know and don’t care what’s keeping Flash off. I’m just extraordinarily happy and thankful. And I will continue to pray that Flash is never allowed on.

Having flash is a double edged sword, sure you get to see more content in your browser, and free or 3rd party flash games, but you also don’t get any of the flash exploits that could threaten the data on your phone.

I don’t miss Flash on the iPhone. If this forces web sites to use Ajax and standards-based code for login screens, then that’s a good thing for everyone.

Considering how many times Flash is guilty of crashing Firefox & Safari, really don’t want it on my iPhone. I suspect Apple has the same issue w/Flash..
The other possibility is that Apple is betting on HTML5 becoming a web standard for video.

I had speculated something similar. I figured apple wants more people to use their QuickTime formats for videos as most video sites use a flash player for them.

I think another reason that flash isn’t on iPhone is because apple doesn’t want a pice of crap software weighing the iPhone down (not that flash is crap) like the crappy flash plug in for safari which is bloated and causes over 90% of safaris crashes

I am also pleased that Flash isn’t present on the iPhone. I loathe the amount of crap I have to deal with on the web due to Flash. It’s an out of control, bloated, security problem.

I prefer websites that don’t waste my time with a bunch of pointless animation.

That being said, your theory is very plausible. I suspect there’s a host of such reasons that we have so far been blessed with a Flash free experience on the iPhone.

I would much rather play games developed using the iPhone SDK than Flash.

What you say make sense, but I do not see a lot of flash out there. So I do think it a big deal. If it on or off.

Look at what the iPhone does have. The concept that getting the Flash Player in there is due to a technical limitation is laughable.

“Yes, we can get 3G, Wifi, GPS, OpenGL, an accelerometer, compass, video, mp3, voice recognition, proximity sensor, multitouch screen, bluetooth, camera and video cam in it. But it’s just not powerful enough to run the Flash Player.”

Er… yeah. Sure.

If Apple wanted it in there, it would be there. The bottom line is, they have no incentive to do so.

I think it’s more an Apple problem, than Adobe, but who can really say outside of those two companies.

Both seem to say they are working on it (still). I’ve heard that for at least a year, if not, two. I don’t think it takes that -long- to create/port a Flash Player for devices (other OEMs, like Nokia and dozens of others seem to do it in much less time).

To me, as a Flash developer who works on numerous OTHER mobile and device platforms (e.g. Symbian, Sony Ericsson, Windows Mobile, etc) that are part of the Open Screen Project, it’s a mainly a business problem …

Until a competing device to iPhone comes to market that supports Flash … and is compelling enough, I doubt you’ll see Flash on iPhone.

For example, check out the HTC Hero (currently FL 3.1, but perhaps FP10 in the future via OTA updates):

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices/articles/htchero.html

Pretty cool, no?

That being said, the Palm Pre, future webOS based devices, as well as newer Android devices are starting to put Flash support in browser contexts (Flash 10 is coming to SmartPhones such as these hopefully by years end, BTW).

Right now, there are over 1 billion devices worldwide running Flash (many of them running Flash Lite).

A lot of them people don’t know about the uses of Flash, since it’s very OEM specific use cases (e.g. LG and many other OEMS use for user interfaces, etc) …

People seem to hate Flash Lite for little good reason … lots of cool stuff you can do, some of it even native iPhone doesn’t support.

With Flash and the iPhone it comes down to business rather than technical, IMHO.

In the Flash community, we picked up on this last year when Apple seemingly rejected an R&D player that Adobe had created sighting “technical reasons”.

Let’s be honest, what they don’t want is the appStore to get killed by “off store” content, like Flash can offer easily …

Problem is, Apple’s appStore is already saturated with content, and at some point people will start to migrate away from it … that’s probably when Flash will show up on the iPhone …

I’m guessing it might be Flash Video support first, but we’ll see … then again, maybe Flash on the iPhone will never happen … a lot of people might think that a good thing … but really they just don’t understand Flash, what it can do … or have just seen poorly done Flash in a desktop web context. Flash is no longer an animation tool, it can create apps, games, do 3D, video, and much much more.

-sj

But I too, even as a Flash Developer, have to say that I don’t really miss Flash on the iPhone. Flash as a plugin in Safari on that tiny screen would probably be a horrible experience for most existing Flash applications. A standalone Flash player that could run some games and so forth might be nice though. But again, Apple has no reason to cut their own throats.

You guys are funny, as soon as you find out that Apple is purposely doing something you agree with them. Not having flash is stupid, and greedy

It would not surprise me if that was the case. I am not a Flash hater as I use it quite frequently but it is a broken creaky old platform at it’s core. Building in Flash you quickly realize that you are working with code that dates back to the late 90’s and that it has just been pilled on and pilled on with new stuff. It’s clunky and creaky to the core. It was creaky before when it was Macromedia and now Adobe has shoehorned their crap on top.

Not being able to rely on cheap usage of Flash has forced websites and web apps to compile thoughtful and better built iPhone apps to communicate with their sites. That has meant a better and more consistent user experience for the end user.

Regardless of who is blocking it I don not miss it’s cpu eating code on my iPhone.

The glaring omission is the ability to stream .flv’s. Other than that who cares? Flash devs certainly wont once there is a HaXe profile for the iPhone SDK.

Flash exists on 99% of all personal computers connected to the Internet (in the world). I would say that excluding such a technology would be business suicide, but obviously it hasn’t slowed down sales at all. Here’s why:

1. Safari sucks. In fact, it’s so slow that I only open it on my iPhone to quickly preview Twitter links and that’s it! If there is a specific website containing interactive content, there is most likely an app for it.

2. Apple controls what goes in your iPhone which undoubtedly is why you get so much power in such a small device. Flash compromises that control and for now, it’s not worth it.

Android seems to be more browser driven and would make sense to include Flash. Not only that but it’s also a great marketing tool to use against Apple. Time will tell - I think adobe is a bit naive when it comes to light weight flash… As you guys mentioned, flash doesn’t really run that well on pcs/laptops.

Apologies for the rant - I got a bit carried away :-)

I didn’t think about flash games for the iphone being a reason it is not supported yet, but I would agree it’s a strong possibility.

I was thinking the lack of flash stems from online videos, like Hulu. Apple could lose a fair amount of money if people could get their tv shows for free rather then paying for it through itunes. Does anyone else agree?

Not having flash is fine. It’s a performance pig and a crutch. Sorry for all you flash developers, but you chose the worst possible toolset.

To Keith’s comment, it’s not about throwing down existing content into a smaller screen … it’s about leveraging Flash (and other runtimes) capable of addressing multi-targets … one target is mobile and the smallscreen, one is desktop, another is TVs, etc … there are others.

It requires rethinking on the design aspect of applications, and really giving throught to user experiences … not just slapping a web page meant for desktop down into a confined mobile screen, regardless of whether or not that page has Flash in it or not. :)

Simple, there’s more than a 100 millions reasons why there’s no Flash on the iPhone: controlled deployment via the app store versus uncontrolled anything running in the browser, Apple have no incentive. The only way that we could logically see Flash on the iPhone today is via the controlled app store environment, Adobe need to have a way to package Flash content as iPhone apps so that at least application developers can use Flash as an alternative coding environment. Hmm - what about a version of AIR for iPhone…

I understand the argument about stability and Apple not wanting to hang themselves re gaming but at least provide partial flash usage like being able to play flash videos, so much video content is in flash and that takes away so much browser content, for example you can’t watch BBC news video.. It’s so basic not to have it. Another matter is Bluetooth..they probably don’t want us to swap their now drm free music but can’t we Bluetooth pictures at least… Again it’s so basic not to have it. A phone without standard Bluetooth. Not good really.

The ability to watch an FLV stream would be great.

If you jailbreak there are a couple of options for FLV playback for iPhone. :)