iPhone: The Real Story
by Simeon Bateman
While no one will deny that the iPhone was the hottest device of 2007, it seems this year may be more difficult for Apple. Even with the release of their own highly anticipated Developer SDK looming, the 'Net is abuzz with a different story today.
While Apple loudly touts the web experience on the iPhone as being "just the internet"
, there is a gaping hole in the story that they weave. A very familiar message, "This Site Requires Flash"
, has many iPhone users looking for Flash. And while an article titled "Flash on iPhone is just around the corner"
painted a promising future that 2285 people saw fit to digg, the message from Apple on Tuesday was of a different tune.
In a report to shareholders on Tuesday, Steve Jobs announced that there will be no Flash on the iPhone. Jobs took the time to explain that Adobe Flash is "too slow to be useful"
on the iPhone. And while every major handset manufacturer in the world ships handsets with Flash Lite pre-installed, Jobs chose to claim it's "not capable of being used with the Web."
So being an iPhone user who was anxiously awaiting the release of Flash for the iPhone, I have to say I was a bit surprised to hear Jobs' announcement. And while at first I felt as though perhaps his arguments were valid, I began to wonder. When I was investigating devices, I remember comparing the iPhone with the Nokia N810 Tablet. While the n810 is not a phone, it touts many of the same features the iPhone has – the main differences being that it runs at a higher screen resolution, has longer battery life, and has a built in GPS unit. In addition to all those technical details that allow it to outpace the iPhone, it runs both Flash 9 in the webkit-based s60 platform browser, and has support for Flash lite. So my first thought when I heard Jobs' announcement was just how much faster was the processor in the n810 than in the iPhone? I began a quick search and found myself on the specification page for the Nokia tablet, and compared it to the specs page on Apple's site. Shock can only begin to describe my feeling when I found out that the n810 has a 400Mhz processor and the iPhone runs at 620Mhz.
So if a device with a 200Mhz slower processor can run Flash Player 9, then we can only assume that the quote "too slow to be useful"
is actually referring to the iPhone. Apple is very happy to promote that the iPhone runs Mac OS X. Perhaps with the load of a desktop computer operating system, the processor in the iPhone has nothing left to give to outside applications. But I think this is not really the issue.
At an event today, Jobs announced the details surrounding the new iPhone Developer SDK. In addition to many technical details, we found out that applications for the iPhone will only be distributed through Apple's AppStore application. And while these can be downloaded over the cell phone network or a wi-fi connection, Apple controls the distribution of applications through the use of the AppStore interface. And the really great news is that developers get to keep 70% of whatever they charge for their applications.
I have no doubt that this control of distribution is the real reason we will not see Flash on the iPhone. Apple has already provided the ability for web pages to have icons on the SpringBoard (desktop of iPhone) and web sites specifically designed for the iPhone are plentiful. With the web?s most ubiquitous plugin available on the Apple devices, there would be little to no need for developers to be forced into this distribution model. While the audience of developers could have included everyone currently building apps for the Flash platform, Apple has limited that to the existing OS X application developers or to people who wish to tool up on building OS X applications. But the big issue is that with Flash available on the iPhone, Apple would have no way to get their piece of the application sales market. This freedom for developers is really what scared Apple away from Flash on their devices.
To say that no one will build applications for the iPhone would be ridiculous. People will build native applications and the SDK appears to have some wonderful features. But it's very disappointing to think that the iPhone could have been the first phone device to provide the true internet. Being the must-have device that provides all the functionality that users want is obviously not something Apple is concerned with.
Related Links:
- Adobe Bites Its Tongue After iPhone Flash Jab (CNET, March 5, 2008)
- Apple iPhone Ad: Just the Internet
- iPhone Parody No Flash
- Apple Refuses Flash Player on iPhone: The Real Reason (Aaron West's blog, March 6, 2008)
Simeon Bateman is a Freelance IT consultant from Portland, Oregon. He specializes in bridging the gap between proprietary and open source software to provide effective solutions for small business. As a Flex Trainer and Adobe Community Expert Simeon works hard to spread knowledge in the community. Find out more about his thoughts on this and other topics at http://blog.simb.net/.
It's worth noting that although the iPhone has a 620mhz processor it apparently runs somewhere around 412mhz to avoid heat issues. Also performance of Flash on Mac OSX is generally out-performed by Flash on Windows, I'm not sure how current releases of Flash compare but certainly Flash 8 was considerably slower - http://madowney.com/blog/2005/08/14/flash-player-8-on-the-mac/
Perhaps some focused tweaking from Adobe is required here to make it work better?
I think the fact that the iphone doesn't have Flash is a positive. After today there is two approachs to building applications for the device; Native and OpenWeb (HTML, JavaScript). The devices doesn't have 3g so loading all those flash movies that rarely contribute to the content or usefulness of the site is a waste of bandwidth and power consumption.
Aren't you getting it? Of course Apple is working on a Flash runtime for the iPhone. Who is Steve Jobs to say that it is not possible? My guess: it will support Flex apps (Flash 9) and Steve knows that, and he knows that it opens the way to mobile rich internet applications on the iPhone, something that could directly compete with its now announced App Store business model and SDK.
It is not Apple job to port Flash to iPhone. I think that task is left to Adobe as that was always the case for windows, macos and Linux.
Sincerely, having 71% of the mobile browser market share, I hope Apple never releases Flash support. This is great. I dislike websites with Flash. I see no reason to have it in the phone. With native apps around the corner it becomes even more irrelevant. I hope the iPhone has the strength to force web designers to drop Flash from their websites if they want to have the iPhone users audience.
I wouldn't put it past Apple to look out for it's own financial interests and I certainly won't vilify them for doing so, but this doesn't add up. How much more can you do with Flash that you can't do with HTML/CCC/JavaScript apps? Animate vectors? It's certainly is a far cry from what the SDK offers - access to native features, graphic acceleration, etc. Beyond that I actually do believe Steve-o's claim that it is barely useful on the iPhone. Sony released a Flash plugin for the PSP browser, and while it works its slow enough to make it basically useless.
I installed Flash Lite on a Windows Mobile 5 phone a while ago, and no Flash sites I tried worked. After some poking around, I found that standard Flash content does NOT work with Flash Lite, but rather it has to be developed specifically for it. Is this true? If so, maybe this is part of the reason Jobs doesn't want Flash on his phone...
Flash Lite is not Flash. It's a smaller subset of the Flash features, and doesn't support the full scripting capabilities of ActionScript. It also doesn't have any video codecs in it.
It's not about slow, it's should be a talk about technology support, If some other technology is present rather than flash it's good, yet if it doesn't support flash it will be a negetive point.
The point that I took from this is that Apple was promising to deliver "just the internet" - meaning the whole internet. Jobs' point in his commercial was that the iPhone delivers more than other phones and mobile devices. Yet here he is limiting what you can get on the iPhone. So his advertising is misleading. It's not more, it's less.
Also, Jobs' comments don't make sense when you consider that Flash Lite was not designed for the web - it was designed for mobile phones. And Flash wasn't specifically designed for mobile phones, it was designed more for the web. Much of the slowness is more in the sense of what people are doing with Flash. Flash is a tool, and what you get has to do more with how it's employed than with any fault in the technology. For example, you could develop an AJAX application or a Java-based site that ran really slow on a mobile phone as well.
I want just to point out that N810 is not running a webkit-based S60 browser, but a full-blown Gecko 1.9 browser with full Ajax and JS support (Firefox 3 comparable). And no Flash Lite, only the full version.
I've been testing Flash Lite on devices and the performance pretty much sucked (Flash Lite 2.0 and 2.1). You won't get nearly as smooth animation with Flash running inside Safari on the iPhone as you would get from any application running integrated with the OS, using hardware support for animation.
That might very well change with Adobe and Mozilla's Tamarin Tracing. Tamarin Tracing is a VM for constrained environments (mobile and devices) so that just about anything with a CPU and memory can execute ActionScript 3 Bytecode under low memory and low CPU conditions. I'm not sure if Tamarin Tracing will support hardware accleration as the latest desktop versions of Flash Player do but that would make Flash a lot more interesting on devices.
That said, Ajax performance wasn't really that much better on many devices as well especially when it comes to animation.
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