gdgt

The argument has been brought up, and is fairly legitimate in my opinion, that Apple may be keeping Flash off of their devices in order to encourage companies to develop apps that Apple can sell and, in turn, take a cut of the profits from. When it comes to services like Hulu, Netflix, MySpace Music, and others do you think that Apple would rather let you access them via Flash or sell you an app and take %30 of the profits for it on top of the developers fees they collect from the company?

Many people would argue that Apple is simply waiting for html5 and that Flash is a very intensive process too run on a mobile device. Devices like the iPad how ever are computer/netbook like devices and deserve a truly full internet experience. Who's to say that Apple will adopt the html5 standard? Has Apple made any announcement saying that html5 is the future and that's what their waiting for? Apple is very good at one thing and that thing is making money and making a lot of it. Apple (and many other companies) would much rather sell you a product than give it to you for free.

I concur wholeheartedly. As far as we've heard, Steve Jobs doesn't know what HTML5 even is. Even worse, he's claimed that the majority of Macs crash because of flash- really? Really guy? Because neither my PC nor Linux machine crash when I watch Black Books on Hulu. If Flash is actually causing your computers to crash, I don't think logic finds the problem within Adobe, but a computer without the software stability to handle one of the most widely accepted languages in the online world.

It has to be the damn apps.

it makes sense... most games are flash-based online and what better way to monetize them than to have the developers redesign their games as apps that apple can sell? everyone wins but the customer who could have played them for free online using flash...

Apple is one of the involved parties in the development of HTML5. The working group includes "individuals" from Apple, Mozilla, Opera and Google. Microsoft declined. (via a quick Wikipedia check)

Who knows what the timeline between Apple and Adobe on this is. Flash for Mac is something Adobe cobbles together with an effort I'm sure they feel is justified for a smaller percentage of the market. Jobs called it "lazy".

Flash sucks resources on a Mac. It basically takes over the machine. If my machine runs hot and slow, nine times out of 10 it's because I left open a Flash window in a browser. I use Safari and Chrome most of the time but also have Firefox and Opera installed. I run NetNewsWire too, set to run it's internal browser. By its interaction with "Click-to-Flash" it must be using Safari.

I block Flash on all browsers. I only turn it on if it's something I really want to see.

The one Flash thing I do that causes no problem at all is run Hulu Desktop. It works great.

Bugs aside bad implementation is a big part of the problem? Apple is all about aesthetics. Badly written Flash ad covered pages make up an unpleasantly large part of the web. By ignoring Flash, apple is ignoring that too.

I'd be more inclined to buy the theory if they had included other technologies that are potentially resource intensive (specifically multitasking.) The geekerati have pounded the iPad on both issues. You don't think that Apple knew they'd take a lot of heat and likely not sell quite as many devices for missing these features?

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not foolish enough to believe that if Apple stood to gain substantially more money selling flash apps that they wouldn't figure out a way to do it. But here is flash's case as I see it from Apple's perspective.
1. Uses a lot of cpu/battery
2. It's a closed system and it's not *our* closed system
3. There are potential security holes
4. We may make more money/recognition by app development
5. We give up some of the control of the device (only google has native apps? maps and youtube?)
6. Flash's development has been historically slow. We gave them a whack two and a half years ago and they didn't respond the way we'd like. Why are we going to bet the future of our new device on them?
7. Many developers will support our product regardless since we have a premium customer demographic

Against
1. There are websites/games that won't be supported immediately
2. We have a long term relationship with this company (photoshop kept us afloat for a long time)

Honestly if I were Apple, I wouldn't have a very difficult decision *if* I thought I could weather the initial storm. If I didn't have content immediately available for the device I'd absolutely try to support as much legacy content as possible. But, this may be one of the most unusual new category launches ever (yeah yeah I know it's *just* a giant ipod.) It has a ludicrous amount of things you can do with it available out of the box.

I don't think its about sales as much as about creating "perfect world" of Mr. Jobs. This world is largely isolated and extends only where the creator feels it should. And I think he is largely driven by two questions would it be useful, would the experience we spotless. He is not going after maximizing usefulness.

The real flash situation is that Apple wants total control of the iPhone OS and letting Flash runs freely would means a few hundred millions of free (games and useless) applications that may not need to have approval from Apple. Flash will circunvent (run around) the approval system and will only need the bless from Adobe, a thing that has been a mess on the Mac platform, Adobe has opted to tweak its applications to work better on Windows, pushing to a second class citizen status the whole mac platform.

If Adobe takes the control of the iPhone platform this will the moment that Apple will suffer a historic setback, while Flash could help bringing more applications, the same will be massive battery drain for the iPhone and the iPad if Flash keeps eating resources as it does on the Mac Desktop.

I would like to see flash on the iPhone or my future iPad, but time has proved that Apple hasn't needed to achieve the level of mass adoption the iPhone and the iPod Touch have had.

i use click to flash and blashflash it block flash in my macbook air and i havent seen seen a crash in my browser since them.

no flash
-more battery
-more performance
-no crash
-no malicious hackers/software/virus in the iphone
-no malicious " " " " in the ipad
despite iphone doesnt have flash it has sold millions devices
- its true flash for mobile is very bad , only 2 adobe engineers are working in flash for mobile.

simple solution

want flash - buy a non-apple smartphone or non-apple MID

don't want flash - buy a iphone/ipod touch/tampad....