Adobe has taken a final stand against Apple's bully-boy anti-flash tactics, and has gone and scrapped all Flash and AIR development for the iPhone OS.
It has not gone so far as to completely dump the ability for devs to work on the iPhone and iPad with Flash CS5, but it seems as far as any new development goes, it couldn't give a monkeys anymore.
Apple recently made a few amendments in its developer license for iPhone which was essentially a big slap in the face, two fingers up and all the rest of it to Adobe. Apple is notoriously trying to push its own platform on the industry to gain a stranglehold where it sees Adobe Flash as competition.
On Downloadsquad.com Sebastian Anthony says that Adobe's actions are 'indicative of a much greater problem: a lack of trust in the Apple platform.' We agree - if Apple keeps trying to monopolise the ins-and-outs of the web and the backend technology behind it, it can't end well for anyone.
While it is nice that a company is making a stand against the all-seeing-Apple, it's a great shame that the companies came to blows to this effect in the first place.
Adobe is going ahead and doing the done thing when Apple aggravates, which is of course hopping into bed with The Schmidt Gang. It will now increase its flash presence for Android, with Flash Player 10 becoming available soon.
Mike Chambers, on his blog, makes it very clear what he thinks of Apple at the moment. He reckons that Apple is shooting itself in the foot in the name of greed: "There is no technical reason that Flash can't run on the iPhone." He also lists a couple of developers who, after originally targeting iPhone users with their flash games, made the switch to Android because they thought it to be the better platform. Interestingly, he says that he is very much looking forward to the Android tablets / iPad competitors that are coming out later this year.
While Adobe has now severed ties with Apple, it seems there is a bitter taste in the mouth and the fight is still very much on.
.jpg){kind=icon}
Flash is a proprietary technology led by a single company. It is losing favour with developers and users because the heavyweight plugin it runs in is CPU intensive.
HTML5 is the open standard that all platform vendors (even Microsoft, albeit slowly) are heading towards. HTML5 will supercede Flash, and Apple have made the notable statement of favouring it over Flash.
This is good for users, good for open standards and involves a lot more work for Apple than simply allowing Adobe to build a Flash plugin for iPhone and iPad
"made the switch to Apple"
should read
"made the switch to Adobe"
__a literal,
but only in
the figurative language sense.
Sorry big A, but I'm not about to support a product of which you seem dictatorship like in your control over.
*hugs Android handset*
Anyway, this seems like a fairly sensible business decision - if Apple won't let them on the platform then there's not much point developing the software. Will be interesting to see whether users end up buying Android in order to get Flash or whether the iPhone/iPad platform has enough pull to get site owners to drop Flash.