Steve Jobs pens open letter about Flash

Most companies would sue, create anti-hack software updates, etc... if they were serious about eliminating jailbreaks.

Apple has done nothing about this, petty little software updates, but they've left the infrastructure wide open since day one. They could have closed/ended this with the 2nd revision of the iPhone but they didn't.

They didn't because this is Apple's alternative to Google's "beta forever" program. They've learned a ton of what people want, (think gigantic user testing group) what people are doing with their phones and what they want.

Microsoft's legacy support has made them what they are today, to some extent. However, it's also what's put them behind a major sized 8-ball as well. If MS were to lose dominance in the desktop market, legacy would be cited as the #1 reason why. It's held Windows back for years, stifling any innovation they buy or steal.

Looks like Apple has given in a bit on Flash conversion in iOS apps.

http://www.appleinside​r.com …os_development_​tools.html

As I'm sure it has been stated before, Apples unwillingness to allow flash has much more to do with their fear of internet based flash games (which will fall outside of their app store), and less to do with the fear that flash will not run well enough. It runs fine on Android 2.2, and probably eats up less battery than a video purchased from the app store.

lhughey wrote in post #10900232
As I'm sure it has been stated before, Apples unwillingness to allow flash has much more to do with their fear of internet based flash games (which will fall outside of their app store), and less to do with the fear that flash will not run well enough. It runs fine on Android 2.2, and probably eats up less battery than a video purchased from the app store.

How can they fear flash-based games that don't work on touch-based systems?

And unless something's changed since this article, Flash doesn't "run fine."

It runs fine in the same sense as: "Microsoft Office runs great!" or maybe "Linux isn't so bad once you get used to it"

Heh, funny, never had a problem with Microsoft Office after using it for a very long time. I must just be lucky

Linux is so bad, in fact its very good. Been using it as an engineer for the past 10 years. How many EE's use MAC OS for chip design?

Well, it looks like the change in Apple's iOS developer language is more aboutEpic (Unreal engine) than it is about Flash.

Flash sucks the life out of batteries

http://www.appleinside​r.com …tery_life_by_2_​hours.html

I think I'm going to delete Flash from all my notebooks.

Tony-S wrote in post #11225733
http://www.appleinside​r.com …tery_life_by_2_​hours.html

I think I'm going to delete Flash from all my notebooks.

That's certainly your choice. And that's what everyone should have, on every device, choice.

I love having flash on my droid. It fills in quite a bit of missing pieces that my friend misses out on with his iPhone. And my battery seems to last plenty long.

Couldn't care less about battery life if I'm going to have half the interwebs not showing. I'd rather a few hours of battery life with a feature-enriched web (with all it's pros and cons) than 50 bajillion hours of someone else's version of what the web should look like.

But the web is a changed place. Anything holding onto Flash is grasping for a ledge that's about to crumble away.

Flash will still be around for very specific web applications, but you're seeing the very beginning of a war that will honestly improve the web and bring a level playing field for web development. This war is expediting the process of browser adoption, especially non-IE browsers. It's doing this MUCH more effectively and faster than Mozilla's work for the last 10 years.

There might be a bit of abruptness in the immediate effects, but in the end, it a very good thing for the end user.

I can tell you that the draw for big business is there and they are making it happen. I work for one of the largest semi-conductors in the world, with a website that consists of over 85,000 products and countless uses of Flash. We've been actively planning the replacement of Flash throughout our entire site, even on our off-site LAN version. We've got a mobile version of the site, but the flash media hinders a fully flexible delivery solution. Once we replace all of the flash, we'll be able to have one set of content, deliverable in virtually any format, on the fly.

This is not to mention that the web is finally growing up and becoming a stable bed for a lot of new features and capabilities in the browser, natively. To web developers, this is worth it alone. To the end user, they are going to see a blurring of web/cloud applications and normal desktop applications. That's what everyone wants, but we haven't been able to give it to our end users because of the lack of standards adoption.

Todd Lambert wrote in post #11225938
But the web is a changed place. Anything holding onto Flash is grasping for a ledge that's about to crumble away.

I agree completely - Flash will die, of that I'm sure.
But that's in the future. How long, is anyone's guess. HTML5 will replace it entirely I'm sure, but right now, Flash is here. And anyone who chooses not to support it in their products, no matter how correct they are in their future vision, will not get any money from me. Because until Flash is replaced, it's the defacto standard and I'm not willing to compromise for the sake of battery life.

Fair enough, and you're right.. you have the choice and you've chosen. I'm still glad that most people don't care they aren't choosing because of this.

If Apple or Jobs were ultimately concerned about how well such and such whatever runs on their system and the user experience, they wouldn't have saddled every iPhone with the AT&T infrastructure. Nope, the Flash decision was about money and preserving their closed ecosystem (more power to them, I'm just not going to play ball any longer).

My contract with AT&T is up next month. Then it's off to eBay with my 3GS and on to either Verizon (Droid X) or Sprint (Evo), afterwhich, after having owned a smartphone for over 4 years now, I'll finally have the whole internet in my pocket, unencumbered by shortsighted company politics and others' opinions on what content I should and should not have access to.

Allowing the end-user to choose to disable Flash or not would have been the prudent thing to do, but again, that's not what this decision was about. Besides, "choice" has always been taboo in Cupertino.