Everyone wants Flash on the iPhone.
Today I had a moment of clarity. I realized there will never be the facility to view Flash-based content on my iPhone. Probably. And you know what? I’m cool with that.
I have been an Apple 3G iPhone owner and user since the model was released here in Ireland in mid-2008. Since I have had the device, I’ve come to rely on it to manage my e-mail accounts, utilize my time, play music, video, take notes (text and audio), and generally be more productive .
I’ve Twittered, Quittered, Facebooked, YouTubed and blogged.
But for me, the inability to deliver Flash-based interactive e-learning applications on the device has been a significant source of frustration for me for all the time I have used my iPhone.
Oh, the potential that’s there, I said. What a waste, I lamented. Learning “on-the-go” – real just-in-time information-transfer just-out-of-reach, I railed, much like Lear on the heath. All that content, ready to be refactored into a dinky miniaturized format for all my learners: not to be, alas and alack.
More than anything else, my frustration was based upon a positive reading of a very ambiguous statement by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, who, when discussing the difficulties in bringing Adobe’s most well distributed product to the iPhone said:
It’s a hard technical challenge, and that’s part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating… The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.*
The implication of this – and other – public utterances by the Adobe Powers That Be is that Apple and Adobe are “collaborating” on developing a Flash player for the iPhone. Logical conclusion: it’s just a matter of time before Flash appears in the iTunes App Store, ready to go.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Not on the jPhone as a Flash movie anytime soon
However, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ comments on the popular platform, it won’t be on the iPhone any time soon.
According to Wired, Steve Jobs considers that Flash is “too slow” for the iPhone, and Flash Lite is too limited. Don’t forget that the iPhone OS is a tightly-curated closed platform: Apple call the shots. As Nullriver found out in August 2008 for example, the proprietors have no qualms about pulling iPhone Apps that they deem to extend the functionality of their hardware and software beyond what they (Apple) can control.
Wired again:
Flash does have a reputation for slow performance compared to the other popular web-embeddable language, Java. Traditionally, the best flash presentations are those coded by experts with a keen awareness of its limits—Apple wisely fears iPhones being hammered by the Internet’s inexhaustible supply of badly-constructed Flash garbage.
There is a convergence of historical, cultural and practical considerations to be accounted for:
- After many years closely working with Apple (when the Mac was the graphics & DTP creatives’ / digital media producers’ computer of choice), Adobe Systems grew initially on Apple’s support of Postscript, and later of programs like PhotoShop, Illustrator and Premiere. It can be said that Adobe is taking that relationship for granted. Adobe did not update its Mac software for more than a year after Apple switched to Intel processors in 2007. This must have hit Apple’s revenue pretty hard, as potential users stuck to their PowerPC Macs until they could acquire the compatible Adobe software
- Traditionally, Flash has performed badly on Macs. Add to that the aforementioned “badly-constructed Flash garbage.”
- The iPhone is not a powerful computer: it is a Web-enabled Portable Digital Assistant (PDA). I would suggest that in many consumers’ minds that to be able to surf the internet in a full-featured Safari browser on the iPhone means that it’s a “real” computer. Apple surely want to manage users’ expectations.
- Apple is very aware of these problems. The company went as far as to include a clause in its iPhone developers’ Terms of Service agreement (.PDF) that prohibits Flash from appearing on the iPhone:
No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).
The outcome of these (and other) factors is that Safari for iPhone is unable to display a significant portion of the content on the internet. Flash games aren’t supported, videos can’t be streamed from popular television and movie sites like Hulu and the BBC iPlayer, and websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won’t work on the iPhone.
Next time: Implications for m-learning. Will mobile e-learning suffer as a result of this scenario?
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References:
*Source: Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
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