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Apple CEO Steve Jobs: Adobe Flash not good enough for iPhone

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 · 10:15 am · 38 Comments

At the meeting of Apple shareholders yesterday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said “that the Flash Lite Player Adobe develops for mobile phones isn’t sufficiently advanced for an iPhone,” Jonny Evans reports for Macworld UK.

Evans reports, “‘Proper’ Flash ‘performs too slow to be useful,’ on the iPhone, Jobs warned. ‘There’s this missing product in the middle. It just doesn’t exist,’ he explained.”

Full article here.

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38 Comments

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doc

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 1:12 pm · Reply

I hate flash. Most of the problems I have had with my mac turn out to be caused by flash. Funny thing, if I do not install flash on a system, I am STILL ABLE TO INTERACT with sites using links and so forth. Go figure. The web worked fine before flash, and will work fine long after flash is gone. Frankly, I hate all the flash-n-dazzle the net has become. I have been known to turn off java and uncheck images, no audio, just for the peace and quite while I surf. Much snappier surfing. I turn on the tv if I want to watch tv, plug in my headphones and listen to tunes via itunes, which is less snappy but makes it easier to ignore ambient room noise, if you know what I mean.

On the other hand, any solution should be based on the quicktime codebase.
the other steve jobs

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 1:15 pm · Reply

if we could simply view Flash video – which is nothing more than h.264 wrapped in flash – that at least would be acceptable.
M. T. MacPhee

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 1:56 pm · Reply

‘There’s this missing product in the middle. It just doesn’t exist,’ he explained.”

At least, it doesn’t exist outside of the SkunkWorks at One Infinite Loop.
toonie

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 1:59 pm · Reply

Maybe Apple will go with Microsoft’s Silverlight. From what I’ve read, it’s an excellent piece of technology – very well engineered.

I wouldn’t expect MDN – honest and objective as they are – to ever admit that but it does look pretty cool. Wouldn’t that be ironic.
Alrighty Then

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 2:08 pm · Reply

@ M. T. MacPhee

I was thinking the same thing!
spyinthesky

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 2:22 pm · Reply

Go with silverlight despite not being able to author it on Macs. Now that would pretty much put an anchor on Apples multimedia ambitions would it not. Not to mention the control that would give MS once it becomes the solution of choice, something that Apple has been struggling to stop elsewhere
Mac-nugget

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 2:37 pm · Reply

@Predrag
You make a good point. But Flash has a lot more depth then what you can learn in two hours. The problem is that people do not learn how to use the software correctly and they do the bloated graphic intensive tween mess that comes easy instead of the Actionscript lean interactive solutions that are possible once you dive a bit more in to it. The thing is that once you get in to the programing aspects, you are almost to the level of Ajax programing, so what is the point of Flash?
mossman

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 3:09 pm · Reply

One area Flash excels at are vector-based animations. Yes, yes, banner ads suck, etc, etc.

You tell me, then, how to come up with a simulation of how machinery works, with clickable areas (buttons) that change parameters in the sim, that can scale to arbitrary sizes without losing resolution, and doesn’t require browser-specific hacks.

It might be possible with SVG (which isn’t supported by all browsers) and Javascript, but this would cost us 10x more in terms of time, money and effort.

I already have to fight to ensure standards-based browsers are supported….
Jordan

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 3:17 pm · Reply

Firstly, @doc: You must really miss the internet of 1995.

This is a pretty anti-consumer edict from Lord Jobs! Sure, Flash isn’t the most wonderful technology out there and I am not a big fan of all-Flash websites. But they are out there, and iPhone Safari supposedly works just like desktop Safari! Or not.

So if Flash is too slow, give the people Flash Lite. It’s certainly better than nothing. But no; Lord Jobs feels it necessary to make the universe bend to his every desire.
doc

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 4:01 pm · Reply

@Jordan

I do miss the pre-web internet. The web has not made anything easier, just flashier. I never had trouble finding any info I needed on usenet. Granted, there was a lot of garbage there, it was just easier to avoid.

If I want flash-n-dazzle, I look at my wife.
Mizhou

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 4:19 pm · Reply

Actually there is quite a good alternative, that doesn’t have any of the flaws that Flash has, and it is SVG. SVG is based on XML and can be indexed by search engines, can be generated dynamically, can be animated with JavaScript and more.

Safari 3 has partial support for SVG, and if you read under number 4 here http://webkit.org/blog/122/webkit-3-10-new-things/, you can see that it will be even better quite soon.
Petey

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 4:30 pm · Reply

Flash was originally designed as software to create animations – not websites.

Flash sites are invisible to web crawlers that google and all the search engines use and any designer worth their salt will tell you stear clear from a flash site.

Flash has only one useful thing in web site creation and that is to highlight certain areas of a site by animation.

Flash is highly overrated.
Mizhou

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 11:06 pm · Reply

@Petey

I know what Flash was intended for, but in reality many build entire sites in Flash. Mostly because they could get more control over layout and functionality. Now since JavaScript (DOM) and CSS has evolved, I don’t see any reason to build web sites in Flash at all.

Most of the interactivity that can be done in Flash, can now be done in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript only. SVG is a pretty good complement to XHTML, CSS and JavaScript though.
doc

Wednesday, March 5, 2008 - 11:36 pm · Reply

@Mizhou

I thought people used flash because learning to use XHTML, CSS and JavaScript was too hard.
Mizhou

Thursday, March 6, 2008 - 1:51 am · Reply

@doc

Learning XHTML is not hard. One problem is that some web browsers interpret the HTML code differently than others. It was too easy to write faulty code in HTML (eg put a h1 element inside a p element or the like). Because this wasn’t really defined in HTML, the behaviour from the browsers differed.

The syntax for XHTML is more strict, and the code should be validated, so that it has a proper syntax, and follows the Document Type Definition. The code should be well-formed.

If it is, then it is much easier to get the same behaviour from different browsers. There still are some differences in how the interpret some CSS and JavaScript code, but most browsers adhere much better to the standards now. Except for Internet Explorer of course.

Before XHTML one had to write a lot of JavaScript code, to test for browser and adjust the behavior for accordingly. Hopefully this will be a thing of the past soon.

The intention of HTML was for it to be cross-platform, but in reality you’ve had to write a lot of specific code for certain browsers. It has always been easy to make a web page, but to get it to look the same, and behave the same in all browsers, has been quite tough.

With Flash it was easier to author once, and don’t have to create platform or browser specific code.
steve

Thursday, March 6, 2008 - 5:38 am · Reply

Bloody hell, none of you know what you’re talking about. It’s the canvas tag in HTML in Safari. OpenGL ES, and the iPhone has the hardware support already.
Mr. Peabody

Thursday, March 6, 2008 - 10:43 am · Reply

@mossman says, “I already have to fight to ensure standards-based browsers are supported….”

Which retranslated often simply means that, if it works with IE (which is constantly trying to set its own standards and compel everybody else to follow), then it’s good. Since I don’t know you from Adam I’m not pointing at you, but I am making a real-world observation. When I go to a vendor site or service provider site that uses Flash as a part of it’s online business structure, and I have problems using Safari or FireFox or anything other than IE, what’s the first response I get to my request for tech. support from that company? “Make sure you’re using IE.” This doesn’t happen once in a great while, it is very frequent, and I think it clearly demonstrates that whoever is doing that actual site development for that particular organization only feels obligated to make their machinery operate with IE.

Whenever possible my response to those responses is, “Buh bye…” Oh, and I often include a little note to the vendor explaining that they need to police their web development staff (who are often contracted), to be sure that their products and services are viable for all potential online customers whether they’re using IE or not.
doc

Thursday, March 6, 2008 - 11:26 am · Reply

@Mizhou

What you wrote would be funny if it were not so…

You want to differentiate “author” from “use”. Please, tell me, what is the difference? If authoring with Flash is easier than it is with the triad of XHTML/Java/CSS, could it be that learning the proper use of the triad is HARDER than learning to use Flash (proper or not)? I often hear that using Flash is CHEAPER. Could that be because it is easier to learn to use?

Creating and managing information systems for a university and IBM are among the things I have done in life. I learned that most data, web sites, and so forth, are not important enough to people with money to actually pay to have things correctly. What is more likely to occur is that things will be done using the easiest tool to use BECAUSE using the tools that are harder to learn, but more powerful/flexible COST TOO MUCH.