For well over three years, there has been a lot of discussion surrounding the lack of Flash support on the iPhone platform, which now includes the iPhone itself, the iPod touch, as well as the iPad. Flash is essentially what puts the web into motion, and has been the primary means of doing so for a good portion of the last decade, and to a lesser extent prior to this. While video and in-brower gaming has expanded, so has the use of Flash. If you don’t have support for Flash, then a lot of opportunity is missed, but there may be more to the story.

The main goal of this platform was to make it easier for developers and content producers to distribute their content to the consumers, the people who are purchasing the devices. Through this environment (which has been extremely successful, by the way), Apple leveraged a market based on existing sales of their products, ranging from Macs to iPods (and all the other products produced in Apple’s 30+ years in business. Consumers responded, and now Apple is the leading mobile devices company in the world, beating out the likes of Nokia, Samsung, and the mobile devices segments of Sony. Had consumers really needed Flash, they wouldn’t have purchased these products like they have. All the pundits said that they wouldn’t buy the product unless it had Flash, yet millions upon millions have—even the pundits who first said they wouldn’t.

Competing Companies

I fear that many of the employees at Apple view Adobe as the enemy much like they do with Microsoft. Both Apple and Adobe create professional (and a few consumer) applications for producing content, and FInal Cut goes directly against Adobe’s Premiere application. Ties began breaking off in the 90s with the purchase/acquisition of Macromedia, and then the love/hate relationship continued on. Rumors began swirling again within the past few years, as Adobe hadn’t received a copy of Leopard to prepare their CS4 Suite with 64-bit compatibility, while the Windows version had it. This wasn’t the first time this occurred, and no statement from Apple was ever discussed about the topic. My only guess is that the shipment was purposely delayed to “help” Apple gain some sales of people looking for specific features, while Adobe couldn’t produce a bug-free/complete version in time for release.

The past year has shown that Google, once a somewhat close ally with Apple, is now in direct competition with them on several fronts. First, the Android platform and the Nexus One phone is placed against the iPhone platform, with multiple devices being released tied to Google’s platform. Additionally, Google is releasing more and more services online, which help users manage their documents and content. Apple initially entered this space with their iTools and .Mac services, released in the early part of the last decade. Google now offers a similar service, with both free and paid plans. Today, Google’s services could also compete against what Apple is offering on the desktop, in the form of their iWork suite, although they are also on different operating platforms (one is cloud-based, while the other is desktop-based).

Getting back to Adobe. As the two companies grew and tried to reinvent themselves, Adobe grew apart from Apple, as more users were beginning to use Windows for their photo editing and movie making needs. It was a market traditionally controlled by Apple, but became quite a bit smaller as the software went cross-platform. One of the main features of the Apple experience was the software, combined with the revolutionary (at the very least, evolutionary) style of the hardware.

Adobe went after Flash/Macromedia to control the web space. They saw a market here for controlling, much like Apple did with video. Both companies have always been interested in controlling the apps that are “generally” proprietary, suited for getting specific forms of content online. In this case, it’s Flash and some type of QuickTime format. Both can be viewed with some form of plugin, and both can be quite sluggish at times.

We’ll discuss more about the competing aspect in the section titled “Cannibalizing Sales.”

Why Users Want Flash

When you see all these comments concerning the lack of Flash on the iPhone platform, it is likely from about 5% of Apple’s market who are complaining on forums and blogs, hoping that Apple sees their rants. Apple likely receives emails from customers who want Flash, and only they have the answer to why Flash isn’t on the iPhone yet.

Whenever YouTube is embedded into websites, using Flash, it results in a degraded experience, as you can’t play any Flash content other than through a dedicated YouTube app. It also means that sites like Hulu and Netflix (commonly referenced) aren’t able to display videos or television content, which are either based on Flash or a desktop experience. People want to have open access to this content, but the lack of Flash prevents it from happening.

A large portion of games on the web also run in Flash. Just a few of them are good, and up to the standards that Apple set, but it would be convenient on a much larger device to have access to this content. On the preview of the iPad Wednesday, there was clear evidence that video wouldn’t display on the New York Times website without the ability to display Flash content.

Cannibalizing Sales

No. The discussions that state Apple is preventing Flash due to it cannibalizing sales of content through the iTunes Store are completely misinformed or not looking at what is available. Last.fm, Pandora, TV.com, and hundreds more, which all compete directly with the iTunes Store by offering consumers the ability to view and stream their favorite TV shows and, in many cases, movies.

If the introduction of Flash would really result in fewer iTunes sales, then why would Apple create a new interface for YouTube, which is single-handedly the main source people use to find music videos (and soon-to-be rented movies and TV shows)?

Here are several ideas that I can see as a reason behind Apple’s decision to “opt” out of Flash (supported here and here).

1. Apple is forcing Adobe to innovate Flash, bringing with it a faster experience to the whole web. Even on Windows, Flash isn’t considered the best performer for viewing HD content through a browser. If a company as large as Apple can reject Flash on such a large platform (and still be successful), that might be giving Adobe the hint that it needs to improve a flawed plugin.
2. We have to congratulate Flash on getting where it has. Sites that use it for viewing all their content aren’t effective, but the platform is pretty solid for serving a large portion of the web’s video (especially through YouTube, Hulu, and the likes). We need to see it improve, though.
3. Open standards involving CSS 3D, WebGL, Canvas, and HTML5 were created to help eliminate the need for Flash in certain circumstances. These formats are rather new, and we’ve only seen a few demos of them from interested companies. With anything “open,” you’re looking at a process of implementation that is often long and drawn out. Even though developers have the opportunity to use these, it may still be more convenient and more affordable to use the standard, which at this point is Flash.
4. Performance on the Windows vs Mac side is a major concern of some. However, according to john Nack’s post on this, there are more resources being poured into the Mac side, although GPU acceleration hasn’t been addressed at this point. This needs to change, and even though you may think on OS platform is better than the other, it all comes down to how well they work for you. If Flash prevents you from opening multiple tabs running Flash, there may be a problem.
5. Cost. It’s a simple aspect when it’s like this, but the Flash and QuickTime/etc. teams at both companies are building technologies that are simply costing millions per year to further innovate upon. Underlying technology is several decades old, but the front-end experience is becoming more modern with each new release. These 2+ platforms are what help drive sales of software (indirectly). Imagine if Apple restricted Adobe from getting anywhere near their products – no browser Flash support at all and no access to their industry-leading suite of Photoshop and similar editing apps.

Browsers

Competition is good, don’t get me wrong. But the browser wars continue, with even more contenders on the market hoping to capture a slice of the pie. Adobe’s employees claim that Flash works across all browsers without additional plugins required for each browser (other than the automatic process of integration), but nearly every other runtime requires additional plugins for each browser. Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and Opera may (and likely will) have a hard time being able to display the same content across all the different browsers if it weren’t for Flash. Adobe stands apart from the main companies, as they don’t offer their own standalone browser. Instead, they have to rely on what the main companies are offering, then tailor a plugin compatible with, across billions of devices.

No matter how you look at it, Adobe is the sole supporter of video across billions of devices, and that is staggering. Competition may be seen as positive on some fronts, but for video (at this stage in the game), we can only hope that Flash gets a major revision with improvements or Adobe integrates some more modern features into Flash to support the much higher-resolution content and more rich experiences which are being created.

The blame game doesn’t stop at the browsers, either. No one can be held completely responsible. All the browser companies have a say in what goes into Flash, and pushing “different” open standards may set us back even further.

The Message

Much like the 20+ years that went into the iPad, Flash on a mobile device still isn’t seen as a good experience. Apple wants to be assured that the experience is still good when viewing video, dozens of Flash-based ads in a browser window on a 600MHz to 1GHz mobile chip. When Flash has a hard time displaying HD video on pretty much any variety of Mac, there is an issue.

Some reference the relatively small market share of Macs, and the lesser need of optimized Flash, but if the market was ten times larger, the problem would still exist. After all, millions are being poured into the Flash project. 5% of the market is huge due to how many computer users there are. Look at sales of the iPhone and iPod touch – 75 million in 2.5 years. I don’t hear too often of cases where Safari has crashed on these devices, as Flash isn’t on them. Ask any Mac user (and many Windows users) what causes their browsers to crash. A majority will tell you that it happened when they were on a Flash-heavy site or watching a video. That’s all it boils down to.

Adobe isn’t providing the experience that Apple wants its users to have, so there will be no Flash support until this happens. I could be wrong about the relationship between the two companies, but it may be just about the different ideals at the companies, and more about the standards each is setting out to create.

I am not a developer or programmer by any means, but wanted to contribute what I saw happening in the industry surrounding Adobe’s Flash and Apple.