Thoughts On Flash

Apple has a long relationship with Adobe.
In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their
proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting
their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple
invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many
years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer
desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that
golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through
its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate
market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still
work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users
buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond
that there are few joint interests.



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.

First,
there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100%
proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has
sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc.
While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not
mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe
and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is
a closed system.

Apple has many proprietary
products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod
and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards
pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash,
Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards.
Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power
implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web
standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others,
lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography,
animations and transitions without relying on third party browser
plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by
a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.

Apple
even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began
with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete
open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the
Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been
widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses
it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will
use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than
Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open,
Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.

Second, there’s the “full web”.

Adobe has repeatedly
said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web”
because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say
is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern
format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads. YouTube,
with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app
bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering
perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever.
Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN,
MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall
Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic,
and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing
much video.

Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices
cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are
over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and
many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment
titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other
platform in the world.

Third, there’s reliability,
security and performance.

Symantec recently highlighted
Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We
also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs
crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but
they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to
reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and
iPads by adding Flash.

In addition, Flash has not
performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe
to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile
device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe
publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early
2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010,
and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will
eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who
knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life.

To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile
devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in
software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern
mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry
standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been
adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other
companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for
H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires
an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile
chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on
an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours,
while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours
before the battery is fully drained.

When websites
re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without
using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s
Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and
look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s
Touch.

Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for
touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites
rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when
the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s
revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and
there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need
to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers
need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern
technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if
iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the
problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support
touch-based devices.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary,
has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based
devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow
Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the
downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content
from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to
create apps that run on our mobile devices.

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.

This becomes even worse if the third party
is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party
may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are
available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers
only have access to the lowest common denominator set of
features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are
blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they
are not available on our competitor’s platforms.

Flash
is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to
help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is
their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And
Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s
platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for
almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two
weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third
party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.

Our motivation
is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative
platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on
the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world
has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so
developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful
applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we
have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience
and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the
best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.

Conclusions.

Flash was created during the PC era – for
PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we
can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the
mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open
web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

The
avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s
mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to
watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000
apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for
tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich
applications, including games.

New open standards
created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile
devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on
creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on
criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010