In an open letter published Thursday, Steve Jobs outlined a half dozen reasons why Apple is not supporting Flash on its mobile platform. Adobe’s CEO has defended Flash in response to Jobs, but some ex-Adobe employees interviewed by Wired.com shared many of the Apple CEO’s thoughts.
In his letter, Jobs highlighted the major reasons Apple is leaving Flash behind. Most relevant to users, Flash is the top cause of application crashes on the Mac, Jobs said, and Flash’s video-decoding method is a major battery drainer.
If Adobe crashes on Macs, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system,” Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen told The Wall Street Journal. He added that claims about Flash draining battery life were “patently false,” but he didn’t appear to elaborate.
Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh, former Adobe mobile engineers, said they were raising flags at Adobe in 2007 about the same complaints that Jobs detailed Thursday.
“Walter and I, being the lead architects for Flash Lite, we were seeing the iPhone touch devices coming out, and we kept saying ‘Hey, this is coming along,’” Icaza said in a phone interview. “You have this white elephant that everybody ignored. Half the [Adobe] mobile business unit was carrying iPhones, and yet the management team wasn’t doing anything about it.”
Icaza and Luh have a vested interest in this dispute: After leaving Adobe, they launched a startup, Ansca Mobile, which produces a cross-platform solution called Corona that competes with Flash.
They said they left Adobe because executives did not take the iPhone seriously when Apple announced the touchscreen device in 2007. Instead, Adobe focused on feature phones (cellphones with lightweight web features, not smartphones) and invested in development of Flash Lite to play Flash videos on such devices. Subsequently, Adobe shut down the mobile business unit in 2007, and has suffered from a brain drain in the mobility space ever since, Icaza and Luh said.
The relationship between Apple and Adobe dates back years, as Jobs acknowledged in his blog post. Apple in the past has relied heavily on Adobe’s Creative Suite to market the Mac as a platform for creative types. But the relationship has been eroding ever since Apple introduced the iPhone and opted against supporting Adobe’s Flash platform on the mobile device. Tensions increased when Apple released the iPad, which continues Apple’s steadfast lack of Flash support.
Adobe last year announced it was developing a work-around for Flash developers to easily port their programs into iPhone apps. But this month, just a week before Adobe was scheduled to release the feature, Apple issued a new clause in its developer policy, which stipulated that iPhone apps must be coded with Apple-approved programming languages (not Flash).
Adobe’s 2007 decision to focus on Flash Lite and feature phones instead of iPhone compatibility is the reason Adobe is behind and still has not offered a fine-tuned version of Flash for any smartphone, including the iPhone or any Android device, Icaza and Luh said.
The pair echoed many of the same concerns expressed by the Apple CEO.
“Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS,” Luh said. “It wasn’t designed with that in mind at all.”
Luh was also formerly employed by Apple on the Final Cut Pro team. He said that because Adobe’s iPhone Packager didn’t use Apple’s toolchain to create apps, the resulting code would not work well on an iPhone or iPad. For instance, apps made with Packager are much larger than they would be if they were made with Xcode. A simple “Hello World” app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone is substantially larger in file size, and it would take up 3.6 MB when it should be no larger than 400K when made with Xcode, according to James Eberhardt, a mobile developer who has tested iPhone Packager.
Macromedia, the original maker of Flash, was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Luh said it was disappointing that Adobe failed to translate Macromedia’s success into a compelling mobile platform.
“The biggest irony of all is that Adobe Macromedia was so far ahead of the game, it was unbelievable; it was a billion-dollar industry,” Luh said. “Macromedia was essential to that entire ecosystem…. The fact that through Adobe, they couldn’t find a way to convert that to the rest of the world through smartphones, they really kind of just lost sight of what was really important.”
Adobe declined to speak on the phone with Wired.com in response to Jobs’ and the ex-Adobe employees’ statements. However, a representative provided a written statement:
Adobe/Macromedia launched its mobile business about eight years ago to bring a version of Flash (Flash Lite) designed specifically for phones with very limited performance, memory and web-browsing support. Since then Flash has enabled rich user interfaces, mobile data services and access to some of the rich content on the Web on more than 1.3 billion mass market handsets worldwide. From 2002 thru 2007, device capabilities for supporting the full web or desktop versions of Flash Player were very limited. Smartphones capable of rendering the full web began reaching interesting volumes in 2008, which led Adobe to begin the important and complex optimization work with mobile platforms partners including ARM, Intel, Broadcom, nVidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others. With Flash Player 10.1, which was unveiled at MAX 2009, numerous improvements have been made to enable a rich, compelling, web experience. We are now in the final stretch and are excited to make the full Flash Player available on first mobile platforms including Android in the first half of 2010.
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Photo: Brian Derballa/Wired.com
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