Flashy iPhone without Flash

More and more I wonder why apple chose to not ship the iPhone safari with a flash player support, seems crazy to me considering the multimedia capabilities of the phone and the fact a LOT of websites depend on it (I couldn’t access the lego online shop on my iPhone recently) . One excuse I heard from Apple is that the touch interface would not work with most Flash media but I don’t buy this. Steve Jobs
has been critical of Flash for the iPhone in the past, suggesting that the mobile version of Flash isn’t powerful enough for the iPhone, and that the Mac version is too bloated for mobile gadgets - I don’t buy this either…Nokia have a version of the Flash player running on their handsets fine. From the Adobe camp we hear “We have a version that’s working on the emulation. This is still on the computer and you know, we have to continue to move it from a test environment onto the device and continue to make it work. So we are pleased with the internal progress that we’ve made to date.” This is bollocks too…mainly because this should have been sorted out a long time ago before even the 3G shipped. On top of this and to my amusement I saw on the BBC today a
story about how Apple’s latest iPhone ad is misleading because it does not offer ‘The full Internet” on the phone, the ASA has received complaints from consumers claiming that lack of support for Flash and Java means that not all parts of the internet are available on the iPhone. Well if the rumours and press statements are correct we can expect a Flash player for the iPhone soon, but I am not so confident due to Steve Jobs arrogance and bad relationship with Adobe. Shame because this would improve the iPhone browsing experience considerably for us (the people who pay handsomely for the device and app content), maybe another recent example of Apple not caring too much about their customers and product quality?
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Kai // Aug 27, 2008 at 10:49 am
I think Apple realises that Flash would cannibalise, if not destroy the market for Apps.
You have a massive developer community that can much more easily create flash apps than native iPhone apps.
2 Darryl // Aug 27, 2008 at 10:58 am
That’s very true Kai, well spotted…I wonder what cut Apple get from each app they sell…another sign of the heavy handed tactics from the new ‘evil’ Apple
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