Comments on: On Apple and Flash http://vombie.com/2010/04/29/on-apple-and-flash/ Musings of a geeky gal Thu, 19 May 2011 14:25:49 +0000 hourly 1 By: Jose Galdamez http://vombie.com/2010/04/29/on-apple-and-flash/comment-page-1/#comment-98 Jose Galdamez Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:25:53 +0000 http://vombie.com/?p=364#comment-98 Great writeup. I agree with all the points. On the one about Apple being against Flash in order to protect its App Store, it's worth noting that app sales make up less than 1% of Apple's total revenue. Most of their profit margins come through selling hardware at a premium. There's not much incentive to make money from app sales alone, but if the quality of apps on the iPhone are top notch then that will drive more customers to want the device. Hence, more hardware sales. Part of making sure that the apps are of the highest caliber comes with strong-arming developers into utilizing the latest and greatest APIs that allow efficient and easy access to some of the device's more specific features (e.g. camera, animation, accelerometer, multi-tasking, iTunes library, etc.). Developers who don't want to learn Objective-C still have the option of writing a Web app using standard Web technologies combining HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The added benefit with the Web approach is that with some minor tweaking the app will probably run on an Android device as well. Even still, Flash devs need to just drop the whole "write once, run anywhere" garbage that Adobe puts out. It is such a farce that I couldn't care less if Flash ever took off on the mobile platform. In fact, I would rather it didn't. It does a decent enough job on the desktop, but for mobile Adobe has been dragging its feet for quite some time. Maybe it'll do okay on the Froyo 2.2 devices, but the fact that we've been waiting since 2007 for this software update speaks volumes about why Jobs won't place all his apples in the Flash basket. Great writeup. I agree with all the points. On the one about Apple being against Flash in order to protect its App Store, it’s worth noting that app sales make up less than 1% of Apple’s total revenue. Most of their profit margins come through selling hardware at a premium. There’s not much incentive to make money from app sales alone, but if the quality of apps on the iPhone are top notch then that will drive more customers to want the device. Hence, more hardware sales. Part of making sure that the apps are of the highest caliber comes with strong-arming developers into utilizing the latest and greatest APIs that allow efficient and easy access to some of the device’s more specific features (e.g. camera, animation, accelerometer, multi-tasking, iTunes library, etc.).

Developers who don’t want to learn Objective-C still have the option of writing a Web app using standard Web technologies combining HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The added benefit with the Web approach is that with some minor tweaking the app will probably run on an Android device as well. Even still, Flash devs need to just drop the whole “write once, run anywhere” garbage that Adobe puts out. It is such a farce that I couldn’t care less if Flash ever took off on the mobile platform. In fact, I would rather it didn’t. It does a decent enough job on the desktop, but for mobile Adobe has been dragging its feet for quite some time. Maybe it’ll do okay on the Froyo 2.2 devices, but the fact that we’ve been waiting since 2007 for this software update speaks volumes about why Jobs won’t place all his apples in the Flash basket.

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