Adobe Getting Snarky Over Flash on iPhone
Adobe’s getting snarky over the continued absence of Flash on the iPhone, now presenting users with the above message which reads:
Flash Player not available for your device. Apple restricts use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch (sic).
Fair enough. Apple doesn’t allow code interpreters like Flash, Java, SilverLight, etc. on the iPhone. Even Apple’s own media plugin, QuickTime, doesn’t run inline on websites but rather launches a separate player app to show videos.
While the iPhone has an amazing web browser with Safari, it’s still a mobile web browser, and the iPhone doesn’t have anywhere near the CPU power, memory, battery, or other hardware resources that a laptop does, and even laptops can still be hit especially hard by Flash content. Maybe Adobe’s upcoming mobile friendly Flash 10.1 will finally present a really good, optimized, clean (and dare we hope secure and privacy-respectful) version of the plugin.
That is, if we’re getting the true story from either Apple or Adobe (as highlighted by this reddit thread, whether real or parody).
[via Adobe UI Gripes]
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Hah that sucks.
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I can’t wait for flash support on iPhone! That’s the only thing I miss from my n95..
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:20 pm
First
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:24 pm
If skyfire was Iphone compatible that would do it for me also.
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Wow, hostile much?
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Skyfire is a proxy browser. It doesn’t render Flash, it renders the whole website on their servers then sends a representation to your device. That breaks SSL and hopefully as bandwidth gets better, won’t be needed anymore (like how dial-up accelerators have faded in the face of broadband).
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:53 pm
i hope the resource pig security hole known as flash never gets on the iphone. adobe sucks. a lot.
November 3rd, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Once again, Java and .NET VMs are not interpreters. Arguably, neither is Flash, though that is close enough for government work…
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
The Android browser supports Flash.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Flash is proprietary, closed and a resource hog. Flash deserves to fade away in favor of HTML 5.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:05 pm
This does not seem snarky in the least. A non-trivial percentage of customers want Flash on the iphone, and would first turn to Adobe to get a player and complain to Adobe if one is not available. Adobe has been on record for over a year saying they want to make an iphone flash player, but Apple’s terms prohibit it. A snarky response would restate part of this history, but this just seems a simple statement of the facts of the situation.
How else could Adobe respond to those people?
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Flash can bring my MacBook Pro to it’s knees in a matter of minutes, I’d hate to see how my iPhone would cope. YouTube works, and I don’t need flash for anything else (not a fan of monkey banner ads)
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:26 pm
@Virtuous
The Flash specification is published. Only Adobe can change the specification, but anybody, including Apple, can make their own player and implementation by following the spec:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:27 pm
flash can burn in hell, its the bigest peice of **** ever created. it was new when the web was booming but its still garbage.
i rather see silverlight then flash support.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:33 pm
flash was good only due to the start of the popularity of the web and java scripts back in the 90’s it became a bloated spyware in y2k onward.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I love my iPhone but yes I do want flash that would make it way better than what it already is.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:47 pm
There’s absolutely nothing “snarky” nor inappropriate about Adobe’s message… regardless of what anyone thinks of the technology.
November 3rd, 2009 at 3:48 pm
All I want to do is play videos that are not in YouTube or that are not in .mp4 or .mov format. Is that too much to ask?
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Flash, silverlight ect. I don’t really care who or how; I just wish something could be implemented. I’m fed up of visiting sites requiring flash. I mean for instance the facebook app works fine, yet I still can’t play the games on my 3G. I can wait for now and hopefully it will come with the next iPhone on 4.0.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Nice, clean and straight to the point information. Keep it up.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Not snarky.
However, also not revealing of the whole reason for Flashes absence on the iphone. Its not like Adobe is unaware of the reason.
They could have said: Apple will not allow our bloated pig-ware onto the iPhone because it is a security risk and a processor hog.
November 3rd, 2009 at 4:53 pm
Or what about VLC Player for the iPhone, that app plays almost every format out there and uses little resources to run.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I do not want to “hit the duck” or “count the balls” on my iPhone. I also would not let my child visit Webkins on my iPhone.
So please, no Flash.
November 3rd, 2009 at 5:58 pm
@icebike
Now that is snarky
True, but snarky.
Though, to even out the snark, the full text should be:
“Apple will not allow our bloated pig-ware onto the iPhone because it is a security risk, a processor hog, and it would allow people to develop applications and games for the iPhone without going through a lengthy approval process or giving Apple a 30% cut.”
Come to think of it, the current text is fine as is.
November 3rd, 2009 at 6:42 pm
I’m with Adobe on this one. Safari for iPhone needs some sort of Flash capability to be a true mobile browser. Period.
November 3rd, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Hpw about : ” our flash software uses too many resources such as CPU , RAM, and battery power. When we get our shet together we will contact Apple “
November 4th, 2009 at 12:53 am
@av: The android browser Doesn’t support flash. It is supposedly coming to Pre and Android next year.
As for the article,
I don’t see why flash is such a big deal. Like one commenter said as long as we can do youtube, I’m fine. However, I think if Apple wants to stay in the game, and not get beat by android or….pre, then they should allow some developers access to safari. I wonder if apple is worried at all by the droid?
November 4th, 2009 at 6:35 am
Boo hoo. Flash sucks anyways. I don’t even want it on my mac.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
@thedeadbaby:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZLOndllpUM
November 5th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Flash isn’t a big deal to the techies that know the difference between HTML4 and HTML5. But it is a big deal for the casual users who are the primary focus of the iPhone. There’s a bird watching app ‘for that’ but nothing for what most people use on the web every single day?
November 5th, 2009 at 4:16 am
Flash might suck and maybe people don’t way to play daft Internet games. The point is sites like eBay require flash, even the app comes up with flash player required. Alot of the everday sites on the Internet require some sort of player to assist the site. For everybody saying it isn’t needed there people who require it, why not just add it. YouTube isn’t the be-all and end all. If apple are going to keep up they are going to need a full browser not this mobile rubbish. It’s inevitable that it will happen, so sooner is better.
November 11th, 2009 at 7:44 pm
For those that see Flash as a “CPU-hogging, bloated pig-ware”, it’s worth noting that demos on Android devices (as previously linked) and Palm Pre (http://www.palmpixi.org/palm-pixi-webos-flash-10/) run very smoothly. The Palm Pre version actually shows multiple instances of Flash running in a multi-tasking environment.
Since the iPhone can record video which requires saving and compressing significant information to storage, it should surely be able to handle playing Flash. If it really can’t, then one has to wonder why the iPhone is underpowered when compared to Palm and Android devices.
I don’t see the security risk that Flash presents as some mentioned. It’s a player that’s on 99.9% of the computers out there today and they seem to be working. Plus Apple products are fairly virus-free to begin with. So you have software that is relatively virus-free (or else we’d all be in trouble on our computers) on hardware that is historically fairly virus-free. Sounds pretty good to me.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:04 am
It seems, so many of you iPhone zombies are so enamored by your iPhone, that you’re willingly to bash just about anything that doesn’t fit into your precious iPhone frame of view. To me, this sounds like a case of Fox calling the grapes sour, because it cannot reach them.
Why don’t you guys blame Apple, when the blame rests squarely on their shoulders? The iPhone and its OS is just as proprietary and closed as flash – it’s no different.
If flash was available for the iPhone, giving Apple has a penchant for intuitiveness, I’m sure they’d have a switch in their web browser to turn off flash – end of problem for all who don’t want flash. That wouldn’t be so hard, would it?
January 3rd, 2010 at 10:48 am
The Flash platform has come a long, long way. Many of the comments here reflect a deep ignorance of how ubiquitous, stable, powerful and optimized the new Flash experience is. Apple is afraid of competition. Period. They are going to loose $$ because of it. They have already lost money because of it. I had to go with a different device because of the iPhone’s lack of support for Flash. If Apple listened to their customers/potential customers, Flash would be available for the iPhone.