Not that Steve Jobs is complaining. According to the big man of Cupertino, people have chosen not to use Flash, and that is why an Apple touch screen device that does not support Flash gets sold every three seconds. Apparently, the man also forgets how powerful a marketing tool the Apple “iBrand” can be.
In any case, Adobe has given up on making Flash compatible with Apple platforms (including the latest iPhone) and Apple still prefers to do without supporting the web platform at all, citing lack of stability and that it causes the Mac OS to crash.
It is ironic that Jobs is citing the lack of Mac OS compatibility as an issue. Demonstrations of the Android OS 2.2 Froyo have shown the platform running Flash websites on smart phones that only have a limited degree of processing power –significantly much lower than the latest iMac. If the Mac OS is unable to run Flash properly, then the issue lies with the OS, not Flash.
Other mobile platforms are said to be getting the Flash update later on. Aside from the Google Android, it has been confirmed that the Flash Player will be parts of the first major update to Windows Phone 7 which will be launched shortly after the very first WP7 devices are made available.
RIM’s BlackBerry OS, the Palm WebOS, Symbian, LiMo (Linux Mobile) and MeeGo are all reported to be getting a Flash Player as well. While Adobe has yet to release the scheduled date of release, it will bring be big event for many smart phone owners when the updates are finally made available.
Considering how fast HTML5 loads and the number of things that front end designers can do with it, it is inevitable that the new web format would eventually overtake and replace Flash. But that time is not going to happen anytime now or in the immediate future, and as long as Flash is still a well used and famous platform, we can expect to see more of it for quite some time to come.
Tags: Adobe, Adobe-Flash, Apple, Apple-iPhone, Apple-iPhone-4, BlackBerry, Google, google-android, Microsoft, Palm, Palm-Web-OS, Symbian, Windows-Phone-7