Kenny Hemphill
Flash, as Steve Jobs is eager to remind us, is clearly not an open standard, despite Adobe’s very public claims to the contrary…
The relationship between Apple and Adobe is cooling faster than a mid-May evening in the Cairngorms. And it seems neither party is in the mood to warm things up. Just in case you haven’t been following the sorry tale, Apple doesn’t want Adobe’s Flash technology on the iPhone or, by extension, the iPad. This much has been clear for a couple of years and was enough to persuade Google to re-encode the video on YouTube so that it doesn’t rely on Flash.
The latest spat was sparked when Apple forced Adobe to abandon its Packager for iPhone, which was due to ship with Creative Suite 5. This would have allowed developers to publish ActionScript 3 (the Flash scripting language) projects to run as native apps on the iPhone OS and have them delivered through the App Store. Apple’s immediate response was to update the License Agreement for the iPhone SDK and ban the use of anything other than Xcode-supported languages for writing apps. Bottom line: Apple doesn’t like Flash and doesn’t want it anywhere near the iPhone.
If you’ve ever experienced Flash content slowing your web browser to a crawl or crashing it completely, you’ll get the gist of Apple’s argument. And if you’ve ever tried to view Flash content in Google Chrome on a Mac, you’ll be cheering from the rooftops that you won’t have to put up with the same on your iPhone or iPod.
Performance isn’t the only issue cited by Apple. In Steve Jobs’ ‘Thoughts on Flash’, he detailed a litany of problems: security, the interface, battery life, and the fact that app developers would be reliant on Adobe keeping the Flash development tools up to date in order to make use of the new features available to them in the iPhone OS.
That last point seems to have hurt Adobe the most. Flash, says Apple, is proprietary. And that means that anyone using it to develop apps is tied to Adobe. On the other hand, HTML5, which is Apple’s preferred alternative for video and animation on the iPhone, is open.
Adobe’s response, a full-page advert in some US national newspapers, signed by founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, was swift. Flash is open, said Warnock and Geschke, because Adobe publishes the specifications for Flash, allowing anyone to make their own Flash Player. Users, they said, should able to make up their own minds whether they want Flash on their iPhone or not.
Having read Adobe’s response, the only possible conclusion is that it realises it doesn’t have any sort of reasonable argument and has decided instead to obfuscate. Saying that Flash is open because it publishes the spec is like saying the iPhone OS is open because Apple publishes an SDK. Openness requires that third parties can contribute to the development of the spec themselves, not merely employ it to build something. Despite Adobe’s denial, Flash is not, and never has been, open.
Next, there’s the issue of choice. Sure, in an ideal world we would be free to choose whether or not to have Flash on our iPhones or iPads, but that choice would be an illusion, as it is on Macs and PCs currently. If you want to watch much of the web’s video or animated content on your Mac today, you need Flash. That’s not choice. It’s not a choice when choosing not to have Flash means denying yourself access to a huge chunk of content on the web. We tolerate Flash not because we like it or want it, but because there’s no alternative. Allowing Flash on the iPhone would risk the same situation, where the ability to run certain apps would be dependent on ‘choosing’ to have Flash. The arrival of HTML5 with its audio and video tags means there’s now an open alternative.
None of this means Apple is entirely right, though. As Jobs acknowledges in his ‘Thoughts on Flash’, Apple itself develops proprietary technologies. It also places strict restrictions on their use. In fact, to many people, Jobs’ words in favour of open standards will have an extremely hollow ring to them. They’re wrong: Apple has a good record of adopting open standards, from PDF to BSD and WebKit. Others point to Apple’s dreadful and inconsistent approvals process for the App Store, and they’re right, it’s awful. It’s also irrelevant in this argument.
Whether or not Apple is justified in its anti-Flash stance, and I believe it is, the crude, and perhaps ugly, truth is that it has developed a platform that has proved wildly popular and over which it has retained absolute control. It doesn’t have a monopoly in any recognisable market and therefore isn’t in danger of breaching anti-trust laws. If developers don’t like that, they’re free, as many have done, to walk away. If users don’t like it, they’re free to buy another device. It is, as Adobe says, all about customer choice.
