Apple shows no sign of reversing course on Adobe Flash for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

“Apple’s new iPad is being criticized for lacking the capacity to render interactive content built using Adobe’s Flash platform, but the company shows no sign of reversing course,” Daniel Eran Dilger reports for AppleInsider.

“Since the iPhone debuted in 2007 without any support for Flash, Adobe has begun a revitalized campaign to breathe interest in Flash,” Dilger reports. “This includes the announcement of a new series of Flash 10.1 runtimes for Windows Mobile, Nokia S60/Symbian, Palm WebOS, and Android phones (but not RIM’s Blackberry). This suggests not having Flash will be a problem for the iPad.”

Dilger reports, “[However], Adobe’s arguments for Flash are difficult to support in the mobile realm. The iPhone has been wildly popular since its debut despite its lack of support for Flash. Apple’s smartphone dramatically raised the bar for what customers expected in a mobile web browser. By doing this without Flash, Apple essentially redefined what the web should look like, at least on a mobile device.”

“Interestingly, the history of Flash indicates that Apple isn’t just persecuting [Flash] as a bully,” Dilger reports. “If anything, Apple is just reclaiming its position in media delivery. After all, it was Apple that introduced video, animation, and multimedia on the desktop with QuickTime in 1991, back before Microsoft was even able to get reliable audio playback working across the spectrum of Windows PCs.”

Dilger reports, “Apple’s opposition to Adobe’s Flash isn’t an attack on a popular plugin to limit choice, but really an effort to restore the use of open standards on the web, which creates a real marketplace for consumer choice. If Adobe were really interested in supporting open standards rather than being a gatekeeper wielding proprietary control over multimedia playback on the web, it could have opened up Flash just as it once did with PDF.”

“Adobe would like to pretend that HTML5 is ‘a decade’ away because this offers some window of opportunity for Flash to remain relevant,” Dilger reports. “Apple has proven over the last three years that the iPhone and iPod touch could be wildly successful without Flash. That indicates no real problem for the iPad lacking support for Flash either.”

Much more in the full article – recommended – here.