Adobe Stops Development For iPhone 497
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."
Hilarity (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This whole battle is missing so many details (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, Apple could just be trying to do away with it, hoping HTML 5 takes more hold.
Re:Next step... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Apple is the lesser of two evils here (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Adobe also said... (Score:2, Interesting)
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".
Re:Hilarity (Score:2, Interesting)
And, as someone who's used Final Cut (Apple's answer to Adobe turning their back on Premiere), allow me to say that Apple can and will make a damn fine program when forced to do so. I'd actually _love_ to see them put together a graphics suite, in fact...
Re:Hallelujah! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple is the lesser of two evils here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Something deeper (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Adobe also said... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Adobe also said... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Hilarity (Score:3, Interesting)
If Adobe saw the potential in Linux, they could truly be scary.
Imagine an Ubuntu-based distro with Gnome + AWM + a nice window theme and an optimized version of Bridge as the file manager.
Sell this all pre-configured as a complete solution that can work on your current Mac or PC out of the box, no additional software needed....or hardware upgrades to buy.
Then imagine Adobe releasing this and realizing that they can also sell white-box hardware with well-supported Nvidia or ATI Video cards, Plenty of memory + HD and high quality input devices... and their Suite pre-installed, and a lot of designers would snap them right up just to not have to deal with all of the installing and configuring.
This all being in addition to their current offerings, but ultimately being less of a hassle for the designer who doesn't care about what it's running on as long as it gets the job done well.
Re:This is different. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.