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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.
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.
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.