Apple's CEO Steve Jobs has published an extensive 3000 word essay that discusses why Apple has and will continue to resist allowing Adobe Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPods.
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe's Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven - they say we want to protect our App Store - but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
Jobs argues five points against Flash:
- Flash is 100% proprietary, unlike the open standards Apple supports, like HTML5 and H.264.
- Adobe claims that 75% of video on web is in Flash but Jobs argues that Adobe ignores the fact that much of this video is also available in H.264.
- Flash has poor security and is the number one reason why software on Mac OS X crashes.
- Flash performs poorly on mobile platforms because of using software decoding.
- Flash has almost no support for touch-based interfaces.
Jobs then hits Adobe with one final blow:
We know from painful experience that 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. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.