Flash support for iPhone is *NOT* coming
By Rudolf Boogerman |
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It is still unclear why iPhone doesn’t support Flash, despite the protest from the developer community. There is some speculation about the bad relationship between Apple and Adobe but there are other possible reasons too, involving YouTube.
If you want to know more about it, here is an interesting article on this subject from the gizmodo site.
As an entrepreneur you may think: “So what, where is the fire?”. Let me give you a bit of history:
For years, we were confronted with different video formats like QuickTime, Realplayer, Windows movieplayer and many others. You had to install a dedicated plugin in order to play a video from a particular format on websites. So we ended up having to install all these plugins manually onto our system, often creating compatibility problems with each other. In short, playing videos on the internet wasn’t that easy from a user perspective.
This nightmare belongs to the past now, thanks to Macromedia Flash(bought by Adobe). Today, you can view practically all videos on web sites with one plugin, which in most cases is already installed on your computer when you buy it. That is what you can call a standard and we should be grateful for it. The fact that Apple and Google were not in favor to support Flash in their developments together, was a serious threat to that standard because by lack of support, Apple would have to develop its own replacement and we would end up in plugin wars like before.
Now, the good news is that there are many Flash based websites and games around and they didn’t perform properly on iPhone. For some time, it looked like Steve jobs wouldn’t budge under the pressure of the developer world and although sales of the iPhone were great, not everyone was jumping to buy an iPhone (especially in Europe). After all, why would you buy a rather expensive toy if you can’t even play your favorite games with it, let alone view your favorite Flash based web site? Numbers rule, so the Apple folks probably had to rethink their strategies and as a result, support for Flash on the iPhone is on its way.
Alas, there is still no support for Flash on iPhone today.
Common sense prevailed for a change, although this U-turn is likely inspired by financial gain. Whatever the reason, I do hope that global companies like Apple, Google, Adobe, Microsoft and others begin to realize that they affect the lives of millions of people with their decisions, therefore I think we have the right to expect those decisions to be responsible. So far, Apple behaves like an “Enfant terrible”.
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