another cultural lesson

[rone]

If it had been Microsoft that started strangling the life out of Flash, Mac weenies worldwide would have been up in arms.  But because it's Apple, all of a sudden it's OK and part of the circle of life on the Internets.

Also, how did Robert Scoble's opinion become worthy of any modicum of respect?  The man is an affront to oxygen-breathing lifeforms worldwide.

Comments

untaxed

[skippy-fluff.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's the revenue that's the issue here. Apple doesn't want to allow applications on the iPhone that provide such an easy, no-jailbreak-required source of games and content that doesn't pass through its portal. Apple wants the recurring revenue off its gadgets far more than it wants larger number of gadgets to be sold, so they are willing to slough off the people who won't buy the phone without Flash. They figure those users would have had a substantially lower ROI in any case.

I always figured the sucking on the desktop macs was a combo of lowering expectations in re: flash for one of their fan bases and the legacy of shifting underlying processors, but I have no data to back either up.

Typed on my shiny, glossy Mac.

Re: untaxed

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

That's about what it looks like to me too.

Re: untaxed

[wisn.livejournal.com]

If that was true, there wouldn't be a Kindle app for the iPhone. Except that there is. Apple does in fact make most of their money on hardware sales - the iTunes store is profitable but is not their primary revenue stream.

Your options for Flash for any phone in the U.S. is very limited (http://www.adobe.com/mobile/supported_devices/handsets.html#kyocera) - no smartphones, only a couple flip phones. Only Flash Lite 1.1 is available, with limited ActionScript compatibility, so most of what you want Flash for on your phone doesn't exist.

Adobe's been pushing Flash hard for the mobile platform, but the smartphone makers in the U.S. market aren't biting and won't.

Lots of people love dumping on the iPhone for the lack of Flash, but you can't get it on any phone running Windows Mobile, Android OSes, or on any BlackBerry. Flash is too bloated for any of their systems, and all the players have better angles on how to provide interactive content; Apple, Google and Palm are pushing HTML 5 hard, Microsoft has Silverlight, and all of them would just as soon you make apps built on their native APIs and avoid the burden of running apps in apps.

So thanks for playing. Next time, try speculating why Java isn't supported on these smartphones either. I'm sure it's a vendetta of some kind, so get digging.