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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."
"Despite what their Facebook status says, we broke up with Apple first."
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.
flash is not speedy on windows either, but the fan starts up on my laptop anytime i access flash content. it's like it's hard coded into the flash client to heat up the CPU and start up the fan
I hope Apple is starting to develop their own image editing software.... ..just sayin'
Seeing one closed off, 'play by our rules or gtfo' company, whining about another closed off 'play by our rules or gtfo' company is golden.
They must be banished from the compound and no believer may ever speak with them again.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Adobe is instead focusing on other platforms, namely Android. Chambers said he will personally shift "all of my mobile focus" from the iPhone to Android, and that he has a particular interest in Android-based tablets.
Guess that means we'll be seeing more flash based porn apps?
Found here - namely 4 apps have made it through the app review process that signed the 3.1.3 clause.
Is there some deep, personal clash going on here? Did Narayen steal Jobs' girlfriend back in college? I can't help but think that enabling Flash on the iPad would only help both Apple and Adobe. I wonder how much business Apple is losing simply because of this lack of integration? (Nevermind no-multi-tasking or no camera or no wide-screen). Why give people one more reason not to buy i?
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This has nothing to do with the current and prospective feature set of the iPad, iPod Touch, or iPhone. It relates only to the features available to the developers on those systems. This article does not discuss Flash in a browser or embedded web content, but rather Flash as a development environment that can be compiled down to native iPhoneOS binaries. So it really only matters to developers of existing Flash games who want to port their content to the iPhone easily. Given the market share of the App Store in the mobile space, though, my guess is it won't put much of a dent in app availability, and thus not affect end-users at all.
E pluribus unum
It's a rival to Fair and Balanced C. In both languages, you give both sides (C, some half-assed SmallTalk implementation) equal time, regardless of which is actually any good.
Fair and Balanced C is the version that includes Geraldo Rivera's implementation of Python.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This whole Adobe-Apple thing was conflicting for me for a while: do I cheer Apple on for killing Adobe's standards-busting, lousy-performance (very, very lousy performance) closed-source plugins, or despise them for their policy of locking down their devices (of which Adobe was just one of several innocent bystanders).
At the end of the day, I've decided to give my grudging approval to what Apple is doing: at least by forcing people into HTML5, they're encouraging the adoption of a fully standards-based internet. And even though people go on and on about Apple banning Flash because it forces people to stay locked into the App Store ecosystem, HTML5 offers many of the same capabilities, and there is not-- yet-- any indication that Apple will restrict Safari in this way. (Of course, if/when they do, then we can start complaining, but not before).
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
What would it take to get Adobe to quit infecting all platforms with their overhyped junk? Yes, yes, people love Photoshop. Just imagine that app, though, rewritten with a modern GUI toolkit and brand new underpinnings so that it wasn't a steaming pile. Now realize that it'll never happen because Apple fanboys have nothing on Adobe advocates and Adobe has no reason to spend development money making it better instead of adding shiny new features. (BTW, I'm not a Gimp fan, either - it's fully possible to dislike both apps on their own demerits.)
While I'm not a huge fan of Jobs, I sincerely thank him for driving a stake into Flash's corrupted heart. Would that the rest of Adobe's hoggish wares die with it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
animated, audible, CPU-eating hellhole
HTML5 authoring tools will bring this to your iPhone.
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
Direct quote from Mike Chambers: "Because this is Flash, it is rather trivial to port games created with Flash that target the iPhone to target other operating systems, such as Android."
Which pretty much sums up the entire reason for 3.3.1. Did they seriously expect that, going in with this offering, they'd get no pushback from Apple? It's been abundantly clear from day one that the iPhone store is a closed platform, subject to the business ideals of Apple (i.e. make Apple more money). Any sane iPhone developer knew this going in, and really doesn't care (or they'd never have started).
I suspect the correct way to view the iPhone store is not "A horribly closed environment compared to e.g. Windows/the Web", but "A largely open market compared to the PS3/Wii etc". Closed platforms have existed for eons without the world ending, and they'll continue to exist in the future. The real novelty with the iPhone is it sits in the middle - neither open nor closed. People are freaking out trying to shoehorn it into one camp or the other, when it's just not possible.
Obligatory side picking: Apple. Just because I will be so very, very glad when I never have to see a Flash ridden site again. Also, because I'm enjoying the irony of the de-facto "Let's take an open environment like the web, and close it up" getting all angry over openness.
Before apple switched to Intel, they warned developers they ought to stick to the cocoa coding guidelines uber strictly. Those that apps that did were nearly just a recompile away from being native fat binaries for intel/ppc after switch.
Adobe took over 2 years to release native photoshop and acrobat readers. The only reason those apps even ran was because Apple had purchased the company Rosetta to make an emulator. If no emulator had existed then they would have lost photoshop!! Even then graphic arts folks were not thrilled to be having to retain their PPC computers just to run native.
You can see why apple would not want to have an adobe flash layer running apps on the iphone. Assuming adobe did not update the flash player for two years, apps would not even run on the platform switch. There might not be a suitable emulator that could run on a resource starved iphone.
Apple would lose a lot of apps. Consumers would be confused. And Developers would blame apple for the platform switch going so ugly.
Now is it reasonable to presume that Adobe is not using Xcode to develope their apps? yes. One might even speculate they are using adobe AIR or some other cross platform API since their apps run on many more platforms than xcode supports.
Why bet the farm on adobe's good will when they screwed apple over photoshop and Acrobat
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
Exactly.
People don't care about Flash, and they don't care about an open app store. The iPhone does what they want it to do.
I don't care that I had to mod my original X-Box so that I could run XBMC, watch DVDs without buying the remote, or backup my games to run off the harddrive. At the time of the purchase, I was aware of the features (and limitations) of what I was buying. I have an iPhone and don't want an Android. I use the web browser to look up things randomly, IMDB movies, listen to Pandora, etc. What am I missing out on? If I need anything else, I have a perfectly capable desktop and laptop.
I'm not trying to flame, can someone answer: What kind of apps do you use on the Android that aren't available on the iPhone, but are so important that you have to use them immediately, and can't wait until you're back on a desktop/laptop? (But of course if you can answer that question, then buy an Android, ignore the iPhone and move on)
When your enemies are fighting. Don't interrupt them.
Sort of. It's a kinda goofy dialect of C with objects tacked on. They borrow some Smalltalk idioms and pepper the mixture with a generous helping of unnecessary brackets and parentheses.
Personally, I think C++ is just as messy so I call it a draw.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If Microsoft tried to pull this off, lawyers would be tripping over each other to be the first to file an antitrust lawsuit,along with adobe and the slashdot community be up in arms. I really don't understand that because apple is anything but an open company and very much controlling. Is it just because they use open source as there OS that makes whatever they do OK here at slashdot?? To me whatever is wrong is wrong no matter who does it.
Jack of all trades,master of none
You joke but imagine this press release: "Adobe announced today that it's CS suite will no longer support OSX."
Never gonna happen but man I'd pay to see the jaws drop. OSX has made great progress as far as the software pool it has. But for a while Adobe was keeping them on life support IMHO.
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
without the ability to use Flashblock/AdBlock.
No problem, just install Firefox.
Oh, iPhone? never mind.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The only reason Apple is doing this is to keep its store's apps, music, and video selling. If there was Flash, everybody would just play Flash games and stream Flash music and video -- just like they do on PCs.
But even after all of this grief it will mean nothing. Once web technologies evolve the web will be a foundation for apps, music, and video. Just like with Flash today but under a different name. Apple's store will just be a steaming pile. And for what? A few years of having your customers locked into your content?
The only result is slowing down innovation of the web. Unless you call moving to an open technology with none of the features 'innovation'. Nice job Apple.
It wouldn't be a problem if Apple developed an open technology to replace Flash. But they wouldn't do that because it would kill their store.
Get a Macintosh.
I have a MacBook Pro, 2.4 GHz, 2 GB of RAM. It's 2 years old, and doesn't support GPU help decoding video (it's a GeForce 8600M GT). Someone at my work was questioning why I think Flash is so evil, today I was able to show them. I watched three videos today. Let's compare the experiences.
Now not all YouTube videos are that bad, for some reason that particular video was just really bad. Many small videos like that will only use 30-50% of both cores. Even smaller videos will have occasional hiccups where it will drop 2 frames. 480p videos will usually use up a good chunk of my CPU (~80%), and 720p videos can drop frames when a lot changes in the scene (like a pan). If I change from Flash to HTML5 video (MPEG4), 720p stuff plays back no problem. OK Go's recent video of a Rube Goldberg machine? My Mac can't play it reliably in Flash at 480p without dropping frames when a lot of action is going on.
It's not just videos, although that's where I usually run into it. Flash sites with animation just suck down CPU, little games can really heat up my Mac. I think the problem is the way Flash displays things, but that's just a hunch.
If you know anyone with a Mac (the older the better), go play around with Flash content. It's almost impressive how poorly it performs. Faster and faster Macs help cover it up, but that's no excuse. I'm pretty sure that I could have played Flash content through Parallels at the same or lower CPU usage, but I don't have Parallels installed anymore to test with.
If Adobe spent any time optimizing Flash on OS X, people wouldn't hate it nearly as much. Apple would still hate it (Steve likes control), but people wouldn't have the "kill it now" attitude.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It's because Adobe really hasn't done much for Apple lately. I might be out of the loop because I use gimp for mac full time now, but as far as I know Adobe never actually ported Photoshop to become a cocoa app. This is another bad problem: no 64 bit for macs, only windows. And that's been the Mac user's cross to bear for a long time now, companies like Adobe (or Bungie) that used to focus on the mac platform have made the calculation that when one OS manufacturer owns 90% of the market (MS), even if all of the remaining people buy their products, it's still only 10% of the total base and more sales could be had by focusing on the monopoly OS. In the past Apple had to bend over and take it. Now they don't. As a guy who started using macs in 1997, all I have to say is: Revenge is sweet. I hate flash anyway, slow as molasses.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
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".
You don't understand what just happened between Adobe and Apple, then.
Apple's said plenty of times that it won't support Flash as an interpreter/runtime on the iPhone. I think everybody understood that.
What happened here is that Adobe took them at their word, and did something totally different: they wrote a compiler which takes content written using CS5 and targets *Apple's* runtime. FLA file in, iPhone Binary out. Not SWF, iPhone Binary. Doesn't need the Flash Player to run. Apple wouldn't have had to do a damn thing to "support" these applications.
So Apple changed their license terms and banned apps from the store that were created by another toolchain to target Apple's runtime.
And, for good measure, they also banned apps that are made by targeting Apple's tool chain from another language. So that way, Adobe knows they can't decide to build a version of Flash that takes a FLA file and emits an XCode project that's ready to build.
Of course, that means you can't do something like write in Scheme that compiles to C, either. Or for that matter, generate any code, really. If you're going to target the iPhone, you'll write all your C, C++, and Objective C code by hand like a real man, buster, and you'll like it.
Tweet, tweet.
Everytime someone complains that Flash is terrible on Linux, I have to remind people that Flash is just terrible on every platform.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Don't go making the mistake of thinking that anything that happens on Slashdot is relevant to or important in the real world. Some of it might be, but not most of it.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
"If you could use one codeset to write an app for the iPhone/Android/WinMo/WebOS then how is the iPhone special?"
Precisely. It would have the same, boring, least-common-denominator apps as everything else. Further, Apple must now wait for Adobe to integrate changes into Flash to support new features and new hardware, assuming that Adobe ever gets around to doing so at all. And if the iPhone has new capabilities and the rest of the phones on the market do not, do you think Adobe is going to code them in just for Apple? And do so in a timely fashion?
History has shown otherwise.
It is, as you say, about competition, and about ensuring that Apple's products have well-designed, tightly-integrated applications, and that it DOESN'T have the same set of cookie-cutter apps running on every other commodity device out there.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I understand exactly what happened; I just don't care.
And in turn, I don't care that you don't care. I do care, however, that you made a post that indicates and propogates misunderstanding about the matter.
"Adobe is angry that Apple won't start supporting an app that it's never supported on its other portable platforms".
Perhaps you should stop posting on the topic until you can bring yourself to care enough to make statements that are accurate.
And I still stand by my assertion that buying a iPhone for the explicit purpose of running Flash apps is a fundamentally bad decision.
We're not talking about Flash apps. We're talking about iPhone apps.
Tweet, tweet.
Ummm, third parties, cannot directly access the video hardware on Windows or Linux either, but apps running on them seem to be able to use the provided video APIs just fine.
Read the up on the problems VLC and others have on OSX. Yes the APIs are there, but they DON'T ACTUALLY WORK!
Flash, VLC and the rest don't need direct hardware access on OSX, just playback APIs that aren't crippled.
So what happens when Apple needs to change an API and it breaks everyone's $6000 CS5 suite and every app that was compiled with it?
Apple's changes to its mobile platform are going to break a desktop app?
Okay, I don't know what you're smoking there, but let's address the idea of concerns about forward direction of the platform and third-party compilers.
First of all, if we're talking about the APIs, particularly the documented APIs, then Adobe's compiler isn't going to have a problem that every iPhone app is going to have when it's time to move them on. An app built in XCode that relies APIs that go away or change is going to have to be re-built using new APIs as surely as an app built in Flash is.
If we're talking about changes at the binary level that aren't really about library calls -- opcodes, data alignment and bit/byte order, stuff like that, or even stuff related to how the code executes in the context of the operating system -- then yeah, you have a genuine point. But the thing is, if that's the central concern, then all Apple has to do is require people to build their final binaries with Apple's toolchain. Make it a policy that third-party tools have to use XCode as an intermediate target.
Of course, as I pointed out, rather than making it a policy, Apple outright bans it as an option. Which would seem to imply this isn't a QC/compatibility issue. It's a control issue.
Tweet, tweet.
haha :)
Humour aside, point me to an IDE that supports the design and development of HTML5-based interactive experiences, with a full tool-chain for designers and developers to import and manuipulate a huge range of content, code and debug applications and deploy on a wide range of devices.
That's right - there aren't any. And, you can't expect the design community at large to build all of this amazing next-generation content and experiences inside a text editor in javascript. Some people can, sure, but not everyone's a programmer.
Until alternative IDE's exist for these new emerging standards (yes, that's right, they're not even fully agreed standards yet), whether you're on the love it or hate it side of the Flash debate, it's not going anywhere that fast :)
Flash is where most of the content is on the web. Like it or not, you have to deal with that. Apple is not going to force all the existing content into HTML 5 so kindly stop with the incoherent fanboy ranting. Content is far more important then innovation, I can list a dozen innovations that went nowhere because they were too incompatible.
and clean the froth off your keyboard.
The GP is 100% right, as soon as flash is available on Android handsets people will use Flash for mobile gaming, watching video's and what not. Google doesnt care about this as they dont want (or care if) their customers are beholden to Itunes. Apple on the other hand wants its customers to be beholden to their revenue stream.
A future without a past is not a future. With flash and HTML5 I have the past, present and future of the web, not a limited subset of it.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.