Howard Oakley
Apple has decided to constrain iPhone/iPad developers to its own developer tools, but there’s more to this than a simple Flash snub…
The howls of protest following Apple’s decision to constrain iPad and iPhone OS 4 developers to its own development tools were understandable: telling professionals they must use Objective-C or C++ is pretty insulting. However, this decision needs to be peeled away like an onion, one layer at a time, starting with the claim that this was a snub to Adobe’s Flash. Judging from the more extreme reactions from Flash evangelists and others, it certainly succeeded in that.
However, Flash isn’t the whole onion. The next layer, spotted by some brighter bloggers, was that Apple intended to switch processor architectures in future products and didn’t want the ugly debacle that ensued when it moved Macs to Intel. Although our user experience may have been relatively seamless, it would have been a different story had Apple not bought in Transitive’s Rosetta. With some major third-party applications migrating with the alacrity of a tortoise, what should have been a quick, clean break is even now, four years later, incomplete. Funnily enough, you may recall that Adobe’s Creative Suite was one of the latecomers. iPhone and iPad futures mustn’t be constrained by the speed at which developers can change their in-house tools and source code.
Below this comes a logical extension of the Flash story, that Apple wants all iPhone/iPad applications to be consistent, and compliant with its guidelines in every respect. Popular and important Adobe’s Mac OS X applications may be, but they’re hardly models of consistency with Mac OS X. Increasingly, their reliance on Flash and related technologies such as Air throws up idiosyncratic progress bars and other interface devices.
The clear intent of Flash and other third-party development environments is to allow developers to maintain a single code base that’s readily packaged into iPhone/iPad, Android and other executables.
As Adobe doesn’t own a hardware platform, if it’s to profit from this new wave of consumer devices, it has to own a software platform such as Flash. Apple could be blocking this to be rid of these alien mid-platform results. There’s a problem here in that many – maybe most – games use engines such as Lua interpreters; Apple needs full-bore support from games developers, so could try to do deals to avoid cutting them off.
Beneath this layer are yet more. Despite many of its features being common knowledge long before the first iPad shipped, Apple has stolen a headlong lead from the whole of the rest of the industry. Buoyed by the success of early iPad sales, it has the confidence to fight for control of this new market. The last thing that it could then afford was dominating developers (particularly those who own development environments) writing applications to the lowest common denominator among Apple and latecoming competitors. That would void Apple’s lead, effectively transferring its success to the likes of Adobe.
As we approach the innermost onion, there are layers steeped in Apple’s corporate history, formed by the long, bitter struggle it has had to achieve due recognition for Macs. A few of the most senior staff, including Steve Jobs himself, may still bear the scars and scores to be settled for the way that PCs and MS-Dos, then Windows supplanted the early runaway success of the Apple II.
It’s exciting that Apple now aspires to complete control of its own destiny. Perhaps in peeling those layers away, the only tears we should shed are for the disappointments of the past.
