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Why Flash Is Fundamentally Flawed On Touchscreen Devices
An anonymous reader passes along this excerpt from Roughly Drafted:
"I'm a full-time Flash developer and I'd love to get paid to make Flash sites for the iPad. I want that to make sense — but it doesn't. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen — and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about: current Flash sites could never be made to work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware. That's not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It's because of the hover or mouseover problem. ... All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work."
Current Flash-heavy sites do not work well on any other device either.
Welcome to the problem of confusing "web site", "application", "advertisement" and "art installation".
I'm not into Flash development, but how would that be different from javascript hover and mouseover features? I think this is a flaw for any advanced interaction feature on any touch enabled device, which means it is not limited to the Flash technology in particular.
Just because some flash sites are not developing flash taking into account touchscreen devices (it's a new thing!) does not mean it cant be done. The whole thing seems stupid to me. It really scares me to think this person makes money developing flash sites. It seems he is totally unable to adapt, change his methods or do things better than he does. Come on! Sure there are flash files that would create problems and would need to be further developed, but to say it's fundamentally flawed because of that is bullshit.
I'm in no way a supporter of Flash, but how is this any different than anything else in the browser with a :hover state? With the advent of HTML5 and the Canvas element, which does work on the iPad et al, you're going to run into the same issues if you program them the same way. Now I get his concern that Flash devs would have to rewrite a lot of their already written stuff to work on the iPad if it allowed Flash, but I fail to see how this is any different from the multitude of websites that use hover drop downs for navigation and the like.
The point that we shouldn't be relying on hover states because of the push towards touch devices is a good one but it's not an exclusive problem to Flash. The reason Flash shouldn't be on the iPad, etc, is because it's a horrible bloated and proprietary plugin, and Canvas, HTML5 video, etc can do the same thing. Flash is now a dead end technology. It's only a matter of time before it's phased out altogether.
I think what my friend here is trying to say is that perhaps it is the touchscreen input that is "fundamentally flawed." The same argument could be applied to CSS hover and javascript mouseovers. Should Apple simply dispose of Safari on the iPad, because it is "fundamentally flawed?" There are lots of sites that use css hover menus. Poor iPad users will have a bad experience with those sites, so should we then remove the browser?
We all know Apple bans Flash because it would allow third party apps that don't have to forfeit 30% of revenue to Apple. Plain and simple. All other explanations are just someone's absurd mental gymnastics to justify Apple's stupid and shortsighted iPhone OS policies.
The real reason why Apple would never allow Flash to work on one of it's mobile devices is simple. The App Store. Most of the available apps could easily be mimicked using Flash, and made easily available. This would not be a good thing for Apple's bottom line.
Apple doesn't make much money off that 30% cut. The iTunes store brings in just enough money to cover their expenses on it, as reported every quarter in their results. They make their real profit off the hardware they sell. So I doubt Apple is blocking Flash just to keep that 30% coming in. Flash apps (if they were really all that important) would be helping to sell more hardware for Apple, without the overhead of hosting peoples apps.
Apple bans Flash because they are tired of dealing with Adobe. Only now is performance suddenly important to them, over half a decade after buying Macromedia. Only now is it critical for Adobe to try and bring real Flash to the mobile space (and not the crippled/useless Flash Lite), even though smartphones have been around a while. And Adobe is the only company that can make Flash better, since it's not an open internet specification.
Javascript/HTML rendering on the other hand was something Apple could improve without having to wait on some other company. So Apple was able to launch their iPhone product years ago with a great browser, and bring in more hardware revenue. Had they also wanted to include Flash and held back the device till it was ready, the iPhone still wouldn't have shipped. Why? Because Adobe still hasn't made a mobile release (not beta/alpha/whatever) version of Flash for any mobile device/platform. The only way real, true proper, non lite flash works on phones now is with browsers dependent on a server somewhere doing the heavy lifting.
This may just be "absurd mental gymnastics" to you, but I've at least backed part of my comment here with actual information on what Apple does with their 30% (IE, not make money with it, just using it to cover expenses), instead of speculating it's some big important thing for Apple's bottom line.