Jobs Says Adobe’s Mobile Flash Player is for the Birds
A bit of light may have just been shed this past Tuesday in terms of why the mobile Safari browser isn’t Flash-friendly, and might not be any time soon. The reason? El Jobso no le gusta. According to Jobs’ comments on Tuesday, the current mobile Flash Player just isn’t good enough for Safari Mobile. Adobe’s more robust player designed for use on larger devices would be adequate according to the Apple CEO, but because it’s designed for laptops and not mobiles it runs too slowly on Apple’s iPhone / iPod Touch. Of course other mobile browsers have no problem implementing the latest mobile Flash Player and displaying in-line FLV content (cough, cough), but apparently Safari is just too cool for school. This news will leave many a developer disappointed come tomorrow when many expected Apple to announce upcoming Flash support along with the OS X mobile SDK. No such luck it would appear. Of course it’s no secret that Adobe and Apple aren’t exactly best of friends; the relationship between the two companies has been rocky at best in recent years. While business sense continually helps them meet on common ground eventually, they certainly won’t be sitting down for tea and crumpets any time soon. The bottom line is this: Apple customers want Flash on the iPhone / iPod Touch. Developers want Flash on the iPhone / iPod Touch. There’s plenty of money to be made and as such, we can expect Apple and Adobe to work this issue out.
Absolutely ridiculous. And it’s not the iPhone/iPod’’s processor that can’t handle Flash, it’s the touch interface that mucks things up I’m sure. Apple probably wants to make their own “hip” flash player of their own anyway.
I am sure once eljobso releases the sdk there will be some developers will come up with a third party flash player just like gnash is on linux. Although a flash player that comes straight from adobe might be beter so I sope they get there act together.
TIma how do you think the interface “mucks” it up?
I think personally they don’t want to use the mobile version because its limiting and the full version is too much for the processor / battery. Believe what you want but I personally haven’t missed flash, plenty of other things I would love to see over that.
Gee….whats with the advertisement? Underlining every 5th word?
Damn…
haha, great post. it’s clear that jobso is just making political moves. there are slower touch screen devices out there running flash desktop player just fine (archos 605 anyone?)…
what you talking about QR?
anyways jobs just wants to trash adobe so he has a reason to come up with his own crap… am stil waiting for a 3g iphone before i get one so dont matter to me…
I just wish that they can get the full OS X version up to snuff. If the mobile one runs as unefficient on the iphone as it does on a mac, I can definitly see where el jobso is coming from. Battery Usage would shoot through the roof and the device would get reaaaaaaally slow.
What do you want to bet tomorrow’s announcement will be some kind of MacFlash? Jobs’ slagging of Flash Player is just the prelude.
QR i agree the advertising in the articles with the underlining is annoying. Hope BG is getting good $$ for it.
Yeah I noticed that too. It’s annoying but I am willing to put up with it as long as BGR has the best content. Plus when using my blackber’s browser it doesn’t show any words as advert links
This littls stunt just shows how childish jobs is. Apples flash player won’t be as accepted as adobe macromedia or m$ apple is not a software company it is primarally a hardware company. Like it or not appl has to deal with an industry standerd he needs to seperate his personal grindstone form apples th 4 year metality of my way or the high way just dose no work. An safari is even proven vunerable to phishing schemes.
Maybe Apple is waiting for Silverlight
Wow! Way to go Galvatron. I am proud of you for making sense 90 percent of that last post.
This is one thing I can respect Jobs on.
It is good to refuse to bow to fat, restricted, proprietary technology that allows lazy companies to take kitchen-sink approach to this problem space instead of technologically superior and standards compliant alternatives.
What do you really need Adobe Flash for? If it’s for video, why can’t you have a mobile mp4 player as technology should be these days that’s faster, bandwidth efficient, and can be upgraded as a component like you do with your codecs on the PC?
Is it to support Flash sites? Well, why t** f*** are these sites so lazy that they can only make their site run in Adobe Flash instead of AJAX/DHTML? Netflix/Google stuff all run well without copping out to Flash.
If it’s for Flash ads, well, we’re paying $$$ for our bandwidth so stay off our line.
Typical of Apple. Arrogant is the word.
Jobs’ brain is now for the birds…suck on that Jobs, you rich asshole. Flash for the birds…what kinda bullshit’s that?
@Jeff B.
BGR named the article ‘Flash for the Birds.’
@Galvatron.
You are an idiot. Apple not a software company?
My way or the highway? So Microsoft if better? Oh wait then started buying all their competition. Ok . Oh wait Microsoft doesn’t fear any OS. Wait nevermind they bought a couple of Linux companies. Hmm well they allow any company to install stuff on their OS. Wait nvm they are being sued for that right now.
BGR really should post a retraction as you completely slandered what Jobs said. There is no opinion on this subject. He said that Flash Mobile is crap because it isn’t the same as the full fledged version. He also said that Adobe Flash Player would slow down the phone and kill battery capacity.
Why would Apple produce their own Flash player? Adobe and Apple have a good relationship. I wouldn’t be surprised, when the SDK is released Adobe releases a flash player specificilly for the iPhone.
You people read way to much into what people on websites say.
Head over to appleinsider, there is a very interesting article that explains why there is no flash on the iPhone.
@NuShrike
“It is good to refuse to bow to fat, restricted, proprietary technology that allows lazy companies to take kitchen-sink approach to this problem space instead of technologically superior and standards compliant alternatives.”
Hey.. that describes the iPhone and iPod Touch! So far they are both COMPLETELY closed devices out of the box and unhacked.
So what if Apple is releasing an SDK… big deal if the apps are installable only via iTunes AND Apple wants them all to be Apple certified. Prepared to pay a little fee with that?
Reminds me of the silly way MS Xbox Live downloadable contents work. They have to be certified by MS and cost a minimal amount. Hmmm… Apple does indeed = Microsoft.
Jobs you suck
@Luca
The hell’s that gotta do with it?
Flash is not good for mobiles? ….SkyFire *Cough Cough*
Well, people obviously don’t read much, because not only is Apple and Adobe’s relationship steady and solid, they accept each other’s differences. Adobe makes almost half of their revenue from Apple. So they are hardly going to cut their nose of to spite their face. The controversy is all made up by bored tech journalists too lazy to get their facts right (I’m not talking specifically about BGR, their main beat isn’t this area of tech), or simply making up controversy to add some excitement to their stories.
Apple doesn’t support for one simple reason. They want Quicktime to be the default media streaming technology. They almost have Hollywood wrapped up and music as well through iTunes. Blu-ray is based on Quicktime (h.264) and lots of other streaming codecs are Quicktime based. Why would they want to help Adobe establish Flash as the default standard when they have their own, better standard to push?
As for the Flash player being too much for the iPhone, it’s hard to tell how true that is, or whether that’s just what the engineers told Jobs. I suspect that there are all sorts of reasons why it might be true.
And anyone comparing other mobile phones to the iPhone forget that they don’t run on an operating system like OS X. Apple no doubt is still working on optimizations. So who knows what will be true a year from now that isn’t true now? Pundits certainly don’t have a good track record, neither do tech blogs.
The question is whether Apple will look to SVG as an alternative for Flash. SVG is lightweight, open standard, and is already supported by Firefox, Opera, and Safari.
I’ve speculated about this on my blog. I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Daniel
Opera Software
Wow Jobs is a jerk for not allowing those crap flash based ads on my iPod. Because it isn’t cool unless you have all the unnecessary blinking and slowness.