14 DAY TRIAL // In a rare move, Steve Jobs has posted an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Flash,” in which he justifies Apple’s reasons not to adopt Adobe’s platform in its mobile devices. The text clarifies such matters as open & proprietary, the “full web,” reliability, security and performance, as well as the multimedia platform’s incompatibilities with Multi-Touch, battery life, and finally the “third-party” element, which “results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform,” the Apple CEO says.
“Apple has a long relationship with Adobe,” Apple's head begins. “In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times.”
Jobs then notes that the two companies have “grown apart.” They now “serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests,” he writes. He goes to criticize Flash for being 100 percent proprietary; Adobe itself for its assertion that devices lacking support for the standard lack support for the ‘full web;’ Flash again, for the security holes it continues to deliver, and for its poor performance on mobile devices, an area where Jobs mentions battery life, further demand for decoding software, and more.
Criticizing Flash for its lack of intuitive support for touch-based interfaces, Jobs says, “Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on ‘rollovers,’ which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?” He adds, “Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.”
Finally, Steve Jobs weighs in on the most important reason for Apple’s decision not to adopt Flash on the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad. He points out to an aspect that anyone with basic knowledge of these matters could have guessed: “[…] Letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform,” something Apple’s CEO claims the company “know[s] from painful experience.”
“Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind,” is Steve Jobs’ conclusion.