Adobe Evangelist Lashes Out Over Apple's "Original Language" Policy

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's recent decision to restrict the languages that may be used for iPhone and iPad development has provoked some invective from Adobe's platform evangelist Lee Brimelow. He writes on TheFlashBlog, 'This has nothing to do whatsoever with bringing the Flash player to Apple's devices. That is a separate discussion entirely. What they are saying is that they won't allow applications onto their marketplace solely because of what language was originally used to create them. This is a frightening move that has no rational defense other than wanting tyrannical control over developers and more importantly, wanting to use developers as pawns in their crusade against Adobe. This does not just affect Adobe but also other technologies like Unity3D.' He ends his post with, 'Speaking purely for myself, I would look to make it clear what is going through my mind at the moment. Go screw yourself Apple. Comments disabled as I'm not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.'"

Comments

Who didn't see this coming?

[the_humeister]

It's Apple. For at least 10 years people have been saying that if Apple had MS's market share that things would actually be worse than they are now. Well, now we get a small hint of things to come. OTOH, perhaps Apple is so large now their left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing.

Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple

[eldavojohn]

Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.

This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:

Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.

Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple

[TheKidWho]

No, the geeks at /. are in love with Woz's Apple, everyone else is in love with Steve's Apple.

Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple

[Gary W. Longsine]

Steve Wozniak's Apple ceased to be, long before Apple forced out Steve Jobs. His was the Apple of the Apple II. The Apple your ilk fantasize about, so far as I can tell, never really existed, as the Apple of Spindler, et al., certainly wasn't anything like either the Apple of Wozniak, nor of Jobs. Frankly, none of the Apple between the Apple II, and the advent of Mac OS X was really all that interesting. There are parts to love, and parts to hate, but Apple is certainly interesting, in the modern, "return of Jobs" era.

Re:Duality of Wozniak's Apple Versus Jobs' Apple

[fruitbane]

Under Scully, and later, Spindler, Apple certainly wasn't as monetarily successful, but the company did see a great measure of valuable hardware and software experimentation without which the computing world would be a much less interesting place. Firewire, Apple Newton (would there even be an iPhone or iPad today without the Newton?), IBM's continued development of the Power line and the CPUs that power the GameCube, the Wii, and the Xbox 360 (linked to Apple if not emerging directly from Apple), Open Transport (fantastic technology which SHOULD have been extended through to OS X), HyperCard... There's more but I've been out of the loop long enough it's hard to recall everything.

No, when Jobs was originally removed from the company it was because he was in danger of driving it into the ground. While Apple still eventually saw some decline, they certainly hung in there and released lots of great technologies and ideas, even if some of the implementations were lacking or too ahead of the market. Jobs was brought back to save the company he almost sank. Jobs needed that time away and Apple needed that time to explore the market and technology. When the two were reunited both had grown in important ways. The modern Apple would probably not be the success it is without Jobs, but Jobs could not have created this Apple without his time away from the company in which the company was able to explore avenues Jobs would never have allowed.

The question now is, will this cycle somehow repeat itself in some way?

Learning from the past

[BearRanger]

Apple hasn't forgotten the lesson they learned from IBM and others. Allowing developers to use proprietary tools like Adobe's Flash suite makes them dependent on Adobe's development cycle and not their own. Apple claims to have just released 1500 new API's for iPhone OS. How long will it take for Adobe to support them with their development tools? About as long is it takes to get a version of Flash for OSX that doesn't use 99% of the CPU? Or as long as it takes IBM to release a 3 GHz G5?

Not all issues surrounding control are negative. Sometimes it's just about controlling your own destiny and place in the market.

Re:Learning from the past

[uprise78]

Actually, you are wrong. I am a developer of both .NET and iPhone apps. The gold rush is officially over on the iPhone. That is true. You need a *really* good app and great marketing to back it up to succeed right now. I have had 3 apps rejected never to see the light of day in the App Store. They were all a bit *edgy* so I'm not gonna cry about the rejection. The reality of the situation is for the most part (98+% of the time) things are pretty smooth going through the review process. 2 - 7 days wait these days. Android is growing and that is good. Android is also growing more and more fragmented. That is not so good. Fact is most developers aren't "ake a good look at the totally open java/c++/linux combo of Android" until things change on that front. You have to look at the big picture. To make an Android app you have to contend with multiple screen sizes, multiple CPU's and multiple OS versions. It takes significantly longer to make an Android app than an iPhone app. Apple actually provides a TON of great tools, really great documentation and a very feature rich core framework. Android just doesn't have all this yet. The day will come when it will, but how fragmented will Android be then?

Re:Learning from the past

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm gonna throw out a wild guess and say that you have never developed for the iPhone or Android based on your disingenuous response. Last I checked, there were 5 screen sizes and 7 different resolutions. Don't even get me started on the CPU differences, Android OS versions and vendor specific OS changes. If you want to make a mediocre app you can do it withou too much more work. If you want to make an exceptional app you and your designer both have extra work to do. And that was the OPs point. It takes longer. Period. Throw in the fact that your app will make less money on Android (in most cases) and it adds up to there being no real good reason to choose it over the iPhone.

Re:Good luck in your new career Lee

[vil3nr0b]

"So, hey, Adobe: have you started porting Photoshop yet?" --or creating a fucking viable version of 64bit flashplayer for even the most basic Linux OS? One not buggy as fuck IMHO?

Hmm. I wonder...

[peacefinder]

Do you suppose Steve Jobs might still be upset about the long delays in Adobe's release of OSX/Intel native products?

Nah.

Re:Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as Microsoft goes... I don't get where where you get the the idea that they "demand" anything. I don't recall having to even ask their permission to write Windows applications more or less ask them for permission to write the application in any of my choosing. Or install them. Or run them. Or distribute them.

Re:Why doesn't Adobe leave Apple?

[gilesjuk]

Maybe because they know that Apple would produce a decent alternative to Photoshop for a fraction of the price?

Apple massively undercut Steinberg's Cubase when they released Logic Studio. No lame dongle protection either!

"Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths"

[repetty]

Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/10/five-tremendous-apple-vs-adobe-flash-myths/

A bit of his summary:

And so, through a mix of incompetence, belligerence and emotionalist hypocrisy, Adobe has been pumping a non-stop stream of propaganda about how critically important Flash is on mobile devices, even though millions of people been using the highest ranked smartphone for three years now without suffering any ill (not even the rest of humanity on lessor smartphones have missed being able to render desktop Flash content, because they haven’t been able to either). There’s a reason for all that talk: Adobe is terrified.

Re:"Five Tremendous Apple vs. Adobe Flash Myths"

[abigsmurf]

That is a horribly fanboyish article. Most of the points are basically "HOW DARE ADOBE QUESTION APPLE?!?", anyhow, lets refute the points.

1: Neither Nintendo or MS made any pretences about how open their development is (nintendo: follow our rules to the letter, MS: follow our rules, use XNA to make that easier). However not only have Apple made big noises about how easy it is for anyone to develop a huge range of apps for the iphone, they've actively forcibly removed a popular method of coding games by a company they're competing with (hello anti-trust!)

2: Apple like to say they have the complete web on the iphone. Without Flash it isn't the complete web. That is moot however as this point uses circular reasoning. Given that most of that smart phone traffic is from iphones, his point is basically saying "all iphones don't run flash! Therefore it is good that iphones don't run flash" (gotta love logical fallacies).

3: This isn't even a myth, it's something pissed off people would like to see Adobe do but no one really expects them to pull out of one of their main markets. He still struggles to try and make an argument here and basically settles on a vaguely straw man like agument; "Microsoft make some money on macs so this means it's impossible!".

4: Anti-trust. Look it up. you cannot abuse market dominance to actively force companies out of business, especially if the dominance is in a market area. They don't 'owe' Adobe a living but neither do they have the right to actively try to destroy them.

5: Yeah... This is pretty much entirely "HOW DARE YOU QUESTION APPLE" and deliberately obfuscates the difference between including flash in the browser and banning flash being used as a development platform for their devices or allowing a flash player.

Get over it.

[stefaanh]

Somehow, developers have to realize that the iPhone, iPad (and in a certain way an iMac too) are no longer meant to be computers with an operating system. They are devices with an API. As far as I see these API's are trying to protect the devices (and the company and the users).

Get over it.

Re:Get over it.

[Flipao]

Somehow, developers have to realize that the iPhone, iPad (and in a certain way an iMac too) are no longer meant to be computers with an operating system. They are devices with an API. As far as I see these API's are trying to protect the devices (and the company and the users).

Get over it.

If people bend over each and every time a device like that comes out, the day will come when every single mainstream computer will be nothing more than a device with an API.

Re:as long as it kills flash...

[Anonymous Coward]

Strongly disagree.

Supporting bad long-term over-arching policies because they happen to work towards a small short-term result that you like is really a bad idea. In the end you'll just work against your own actual goals. For instance, presumably you dislike Flash because it is closed, proprietary, non-compliant, resource-intensive, or whatever. But promoting a ridiculous closed ecosystem will just mean that Flash will replaced with something just as closed, proprietary, non-compliant, or whatever.

Just be consistent, and explain exactly what you dislike about Flash, and what you dislike about Apple's policies.

Re:Why doesn't Adobe leave Apple?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

If it is so easy to compete with Photoshop, why isn't anyone doing it and doing it good?

Actually, I'd say Pixelmator is pretty good competition, and one should not ignore Corel's offerings. I don't know anyone with quite as pricey and high-end of an offering, but I bet Apple could buy Pixelmator inexpensively and put some real hurt on Adobe with it in a few years of highly paid development.

Why would Apple succeed where several other have failed?

Apple has the money and the development expertise, especially if Adobe were to step out of the competition by abandoning all those on the Mac platform. Of course Adobe would never do that since it would be pissing off half of their customer base and losing them a pile of money (and probably get the CEO fired).

Re:I await the day that Apple.....

[shutdown -p now]

This is bullshit through and through, sorry.

The problem here is that Apple is restricting applications that are pure C/C++/ObjC code, not any different in that regard from anything that you'd write manually, so long as that code is generated from something else. Such applications don't pose any more portability problems than any other C/C++/ObjC application written for the platform.

Furthermore, they go ahead and ban all frameworks - even those written in languages that are otherwise allowed - if said frameworks enable cross-platform development. Again, since a framework just calls the same system APIs that an application would otherwise call directly, an app+framework combo is not at all different then just the app alone when it comes to porting to a new architecture.

Nah, this is clearly about control, and forcing people to develop for iPhone and only for iPhone, rather than single app for multiple platforms.

Re:Missing Reason

[beakerMeep]

Litany of excuses. As the AC said, supposedly, supposedly. The fact of the matter is apple already controls which apps gain approval, so any quality control argument is nonsense. Not to mention some of the undoubtedly bad apps on the app store already. The plain truth is people have come to associate Flash and advertising and have put on emotional blinders to everything else. If this was not about Flash, Slashdot would be outraged.

Stop drinking the Apple koolaid

[Virak]

Apple is saying "you can only use C, C++, Objective C, and JavaScript as executed by the iPhone's JavaScript engine". No more, no less. This has fuck all to do with saving your platform from OMG EVIL PORTED GAMES. Poorly ported games are still possible under the new policy. And it applies to many, many things that aren't games. At best, this is an insane and stupid attempt to fuck over Adobe for little reason, and at worst, it's just insane and stupid. Either way, this isn't "good" by any metric that doesn't involve the RDF.

Don't worry though, I'm sure Apple will apply this rule arbitrarily and inconsistently, so you at least won't see the major applications that grossly violate it gone, but it will probably be lots of headaches for everyone else, and be yet another contributing factor to continuing to drive developers away from Apple's little walled garden of madness.

Re:Apple Original language lockdown.

[Flipao]

Just a thought. When tens of thousands of Android phones get 0wned, due to some Flash exploit, for example, and at the same time, hundreds of thousands of iPhones don't get 0wned by any exploit, who do you think will be smiling quietly to himself at all the bad publicity towards Android & Google

Fear is such an useful tool to keep people quiet and compliant.

Re:Isn't this business-101 ?

[TheRaven64]

I'm not sure I understand your logic. If Cocoa Touch apps are that much better than Flash apps, then this should not be a problem - Flash apps will get negative reviews in the App Store and people won't buy them. On the other hand, if Flash apps are Good Enough(tm) then Apple is just trying to exercise lock-in.

Way off...

[Mr2001]

Like MS demanding Win7 apps be written in a managed language (ie C#) or Android in Dalvik/Java. iPhone demands C/C++/ObjC. What's the big deal here?

First, I think you mean Windows Phone 7, not Windows 7.

Second, WinPhone7 and Android only "demand" that your compiled program conform to a certain virtual machine spec. You don't have to use their tools or write in their preferred languages; you can use any language that compiles to the right format. (And in fact, Android has a native development kit now, so you can write 99% of your app in any language that compiles to ARM!)

Third, Apple's demand goes even further than the demand you're falsely ascribing to MS and Google. They don't just demand that you have C/C++/ObjC code for your program -- they also demand that your program be originally written in one of those languages.

Let's take a trip down memory lane. In the early 80s, there were no direct C++ compilers: instead, there was something called cfront, which translated C++ code into C. It would be strange for an OS vendor to demand that applications be written in C, of course, because all that really matters is whether the compiled program can run on the hardware. But it would be batshit insane for an OS vendor to prohibit programs that were originally written in C++ and then translated to C, because even if there were some legitimate reason to require C code, it would apply to all C code. There would've been absolutely no technical justification for that ban, just like today there's no technical justification for banning programs translated from Flash to Objective-C.

You Pretentious, Nieve Twit

[mgbastard]

Owning the APIs has proven time after time to be where the money is at. Microsoft has written that in stone. If there's one thing Steve Jobs, et. al. have learned, is: don't sit on your ass and let somebody else run away with your golden goose. They let Microsoft run away with it once. So did IBM. Which is why he gets it, the lesson is learned - if you let another platform take over your device, you lose any control over the quality of the experience.

You go on about 'we're developers we just want to provide a tool'. Do you really trust your non-developer (maybe you forget once upon a time, Jobs wrote software too) executives at Adobe don't get the power they have to mint money with their platform? To open their own open app store? To begin to charge a per-end-user licensing fee for the next version of the flash compiler for the iphone, once its indispensible?

Let's look at the facts. There's tons and tons of people out there that have some Flash experience and some with actual professional training, and lots without either that can manage to produce something with Flash. Let's call these Flash people "flashies". I'm not comfortable calling them developers, programmers or coders, out of respect to the people that really are. Some very well may be, but if we're going to draw a Venn diagram of Flashies, we all know that's a fairly small percentage of the set that gets to overlap into Software Engineer or Developer. I'm taking the middle road, nothing derogatory.

So these Flashies are out there; they can pound out some moving pictures and stitch it together to do something. Great. See what's happened in Android? You've got a load of crap out there. Steve doesn't like a load of crap. He's trying to do something different than the load of crap permeating the Microsoft ecosystem.

Also, I really appreciate your remarks about how open the Adobe culture is, when obivously your boss said, edit that shit on your blog right now, even if you did say, its' my own personal opinion.

So you are the SWF evangelist. You have drunk the SWF kool-aid. I suppose I might have drunk the Tim Berners-Lee kool-aid. Your platform is not an open standard. Nobody has to give it due respect just because the tools are easy to get started on. Just like some people are visual learners, some are visual Flashies. Cool, y'all seem to have developed a tool to target SWF whether a Flashie is visual, ore more technical. That's neat. You're tools are pretty cool. It would be cooler if you'd open your format up. I know, that would allow competitors an even keel to compete with you on your tools, but hey, that's better for Flashies.

You aren't just buildling the tools. You are selling a proprietary platform too. So is Apple. A lot of their code is open source, and free software at that. And a lot of it isn't. They are competing against RIM & Microsoft and Google for all the marbles right now. Adobe is on all of their radars now as coming hard after the platform. You don't think the Adobe executives let the Flash team go and spend all that development time on the compiler out of the goodness of their hearts, or because it would be paid for by selling the tools to developers. No, there's a lot more craft in the economics of that business decision.

Also, you guys could be bought by Microsoft or Google tomorrow or two years from now, and really fuck Apple in the ass. The scenario: lots of great killer apps are running on your SDK for the iPhone, the apple sdk is no longer in the mindshare of developers... then Microsoft or Google, hai, we bought it, dead now. *poof* the app marketplace is disrupted and the platform dies. Your market cap of $20 billion dollars is fuck you money to those guys. Sorry.

Yeah, when there's this much money involved, and the dynamics are such: it's happened before and it will happen again. All the strategy thinkers at Adobe, Apple, RIM, Google, and Microsoft have learned the lessons from mistakes made by Apple and IBM in launching, and letting platform be marginalized or wrested by a thir

Re:That is the rumor in Cupertino.

[KarmaMB84]

So Steve Jobs is going to wave the middle finger at Adobe until they properly support platforms they're currently releasing software for before risking letting them screw up another platform. Sounds like sensible business.

Re:Unity3D not threatened.

[MrSteveSD]

Is the Unity3D Game Engine threatened?

It looks very much like it will be. The forums are buzzing with fear and anger over there. It also affects a number of other tools including mono-touch. It really goes way beyond Adobe and is going to hurt a lot of developers. If people start using cross-platform toolkits to produce iPhone Apps, the apps are not going to be exclusive for the iPhone. If the same apps are available on Android and other platforms, the iPhone is less of a compelling purchase. That's probably the real reason Java is not allowed. It's not an issue with virtual machines, it's that they want applications to be exclusively developed for the iPhone.

I don't think I'd want to risk time and money writing apps for such a closed system. Even if you totally follow their rules and stick to using their tool chain, who knows what horrors the Terms of Service in version 5.0 of the OS will bring?

Re:Stop drinking ANYBODY'S koolaid

[shutdown -p now]

The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.

Bullshit.

For starters, C, C++ and Obj-C all compile to native code. Native code is native code - if you have some magic pixie dust "multitasking analyzer" for that, it just works, whatever it is compiled from. There is no "foreign structure" to speak of.

If the said magic analyzer would rely on code patterns produced by a particular compiler, then breaking it would be as easy as changing optimization flags, and every GCC upgrade would result in massive breakage all along the line. It is an architectural decision that is so stupid it cannot even be seriously contemplated.

Furthermore, Apple doesn't restrict just compilers that compile from some-other-language to native. No, they restrict code translators that "compile" from some-other-language to C/C++/Obj-C. If the aforementioned magic analyzer can handle output of GCC, it shouldn't have any trouble witht hat.

Furthermore, Apple also bans wrapper frameworks that can be used for cross-platform development. At this point the intent is perfectly clear - note that the use of frameworks isn't forbidden as such, it's the intent that matters. Of course, the aforementioned multitasking analyzer being powered by the Reality Distortion Field, it may well be affected by mere thoughts...

Finally, and most importantly, there is no "evaluation of apps", because there is still no multitasking for apps. All multitasking there is in iPhone OS 4 is a bunch of stock daemons, all written by Apple and shipped with the phone, that provide certain very specific services. Third-party applications are simply shut down if you switch away from them, though they are given the opportunity to persist their state, and queue any finalization tasks for background processing (that's what one of the daemons is for).

Not that I expect the various MS/Adobe/Android astroturfers and other Apple-haters to accept this. They're not big on rational explanations when it interferers with their world view.

You might want to try rationally explaining your own world view, first. A good place to start would be going point-by-point through this reply.