[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Flash on iPhone Hopes Dashed here

[SNUSA]

There's got to be more going on behind the scenes here.
The iPhone / iPod Touch is a nifty piece of hardware. But Apple is going to suffer with all the new media rich touch platforms arriving with Adobe Flash capabilities.
I don't buy the technical explanations. But regardless of the actual reason for this, it will effect Apple's bottom line.
IMHO they're also playing with fire by not providing a subscription based music service.
These are the only two reasons why I don't own one.

[technicaljedi721]

As much as Mac users complain about the propriety software from Microsoft, Adobe Flash is ubiquitous through out the web. Flash is everywhere and Apple cannot avoid its adoption. This is my biggest criticism of Apple and its founder Steve Jobs. Just who in the hell is Steve Jobs to make software and file format decisions for me? I thought the age old saying, "The Customer is Always Right."


If I want flash on the iPhone, Steve needs to deliver. This is part of the reason why I cannot fully adopt Apple in my daily use. I am the decider on what goes on my machine. Not Steve Jobs, not Timothy Cook, not Philip Schiller, or the board at Apple. To tell anyone that they are going to avoid a format on their opinion is wrong. Give the consumer the choice.


This is primarily the reason why I stay on the Windows side. Part of free market principles dictate the consumer decides. Apple acts contrary to free market principles. If not Flash, Silverlight is a perfectly acceptable alternative. Thankfully, Microsoft decided to make Silverlight available for Apple users. I just wish the Mac Community would stand up to Jobs more.

[mikalg]

I own an Iphone, so don't assume "MS fanboy" status on my part:
The truth is Apple constantly makes claims more for MARKETING than for any other reason.
Full internet support ( well except for, ...). But this is NEVER really stated. It is admitted begrudgingly, and not in their packaging/advertising either.
More proof than the iphone issue? How about the fact that malware, and viruses are present for the Mac OS? They exist, and yet all advertising you see has the "VIRUS free" stance. Up to and including a reccomendation to have Mac spyware/antivirus present on your computer. Isn't it amazing that you would not find these items listed as a MUST have on their packaging? It isn't because it is the polar oposite from their marketing (word of mouth, packaging, and print/media advertising).
I know I am not the only person on Earth to notice this!

[masada]

Another reason why I don't have an iPhone.
On my phone I have Windows Mobile and a Skyfire browser - I haven't had a problem viewing anything yet.

[pairof9s]

If you think for one moment I would not buy the iPhone because Flash fails to work, you must be out of your mind. I can't imagine a more insignificant reason to avoid purchasing a smartphone.
Copy & Paste? Sure! Lousy camera? Sure! No To-Do's? Sure! But no Flash even though there's thousands of programs on the App Store to do anything Flash does on a web site?! Get outta here!!
Honestly...is THAT why you bought a Windows Mobile phone?! Have you seen the sites you can view using Flash Lite on a mobile phone?!
You can hate on the iPhone and/or Apple all you want, but you're sorely misguided if you think it's going to lose sales & market share over this irrelevant issue.
/

[cedwards1234]

The true reason that Flash is not being allowed on the iPhone is because it has the potential for users to circumvent the app store. This is Apple's main concern.

If Apple allows Flash that would mean that Flash could be used to operate and/or install applications on the iPhone. This would compromise the very tight control that Apple likes to exercise (ie iTunes and App Store)

It is a business decision that has revenue ramification for Apple. That's why things are proceeding so slowly.

Adobe's challenge is to develop a version of Flash that allows the user experience for the content, BUT NOTHING MORE.

[camptoco]

As an 'independent content' producer of film, video, multi media for all types of screens, I was deeply disappointed when my Iphone could not freely access smaller websites such as flash based online comic nawlz.com and the like. Nor bizarrely could I access the mobile content offered by my telco. Which I pay for. Apple has been a champion and willing partner of the creative community and small business, and at the moment where we can independently distribute our work out to wider audiences and create our own business models, they restrict our opportunities. ITunes has become one of the major distributors in the world. It's a classic gate keeper structure. Apple are of course rightly protecting their income from producers of music and video content who have licensing deals to deliver their content through ITunes or the large sites such as Youtube. Most telcos have their own 'music stores' so are in competition with ITunes. It's a vicious cycle, the Apple ITunes content licensing team only seems to deal with 'aggregators' who in this wild frontier expect a 20-50% cut from small producers. I love my mac and I think Apple are damn smart but the direction they're heading is unfortunately precluding the market and talent that gave it its mojo.

[rupaa62]

there has to be a problem with this it sound like the program would tak up to much memory on the itouch or iphones. Or its could be that Apple wants allot of money from adobe before they can install it. Makes you think!

[Tcoz]

This is no surprise at all. Immediately before the release of the iphone (I've had one since day one), Apple pulled all the Flash off their website and announced a "commitment to open standards", things like AJAX and such.
This has nothing to do with technology imho; sure it's a technical problem, but so was building the iPhone, and they solved that one.

[rupaa62]

I wonder if Apple was trying to pressure Adobe for money to put it on the Itouch/Iphone.

[cg0def]

I hate to break it to you but flash is the most terribly designed piece of software every to become famous. It is a huge resource hog and using flash on a mobile computer will surely drain your battery just as fast as playing games on it. Sure flash allows you to easily create graphical experiences very easy but those are still 2D and 2D is something that has had hardware acceleration longer than flash has been around. Yet the first version of flash that includes GPU accelerated graphics is 10. Also according to Adobe turning GPU acceleration may result in even more resources being used since apparently CPUs work better than GPUs. That may well be try for the Adobe software but in general this is hardly the case. So I'm not at all surprised that flash is still not working on the iphone. Who's going to explain to the users that using flash enabled sites will decrease their battery life to 50%? Also last I checked flash sites do not scale ( visually ) at all and as such will look terrible on any mobile device. In that case who cares if the iPhone has flash?
IMHO if Adobe is serious about keeping flash as a major standard now that smart phones are gaining so much popularity they really need to rethink / rewrite Flash. Come to think about it the PSP has flash support yet you still can't watch videos on youtube and have to download them in advance. Thanks but an implementation like that on the iPhone is definitely not what users want. Sure it works but it's retarded.

[SNUSA]

There's a lot of valued opinions here, but one fact remains....

A major reason for purchasing an iTouch or iPhone instead of a standard mp3 player or a regular phone is for its web related features.

Wifi and the ability to browse the web is a very alluring feature. Look at how the web has influenced the OS. Everyone is talking about "cloud based computing." Much of the value of "cloud computing" is it's ability to provides robust services to devices with limited hardware capabilities. And much of these web services are provided within the browser.

Look at how important the web browser (and it's capabillities) have become.

For the most part, the iPhone and the iTouch are entertainment devices. The average user wants to see the web including the pages with Flash. He / she doesn't care about the technical issues around different capabilities. They just want it to work. Regardless of all the negatives around flash, it's used on websites almost EVERYWHERE you go. IMHO this lack of support severly cripples the iTouch web experience.

Whether Flash is missing due to device lockdown, system overhead, bloated features, device security, or any other development / integration issues, products are driven by demand - measured in time through sales revenu.

As for the lack of Flash support not effecting Apple product sales.....

I'm only one example. Nevertheless I recently purchased one iTouch instead of two, (a gift for my girlfried) and i'm still using my old crippled Sansa Connect. We've only spent 99 cents in the Apple store because they don't offer a subscription service. All the other music for the iTouch was ripped from CD. (If they had a subscription service, I wouldn't have bothered to rip the music from CD. I would be paying Apple on a monthly basis instead. (I'm currently paying $15 / month to a subcription service that loaded up my crippled Sansa full of music.

I suspect there are thousands of other folks out there who see things similarly:

If Apple addressed a few shortcomings, they would have had me for about $870.00 in year one (two players and a subscription service), instead of $300. And I probably would be purchasing a Mac too ($2000) when I relplace this Lenovo. (Since it can also run Windows Vista Reloaded (Windows 7) in anticipation that the shortcomings in Vista have been addressed. (I almost got the Mac the last time around, but opted for the higher performance of the T61p instead back in 07.)

Only Apple I ever owned was an Appl II+ in high school. (Yeah, I'm getting older.)

Bottom Line: $300 spent on Apple products instead of $3000 (est.), and I still own a "PC."

[Augustina]

Flash .swf is still an important format for internet entertainment. But i believe that we still can enjoy Flash swf on iphone by using iWisoft swf to video converter which can convert swf to MP4 for iphone playing. Flash swf converter

[Augustina]

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[Augustina]

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[Evildave]

The 'technical challenge' in Java and Flash is simply that If these were on the iPhone, every Java and Flash programmer would become an iPhone developer, and every iPhone owner that's currently locked into ONLY iPhone store apps would instantly have free alternatives to virtually every applet/crapplet available from the web. Free video. Free games. Free maps. Free everything.

Things that Apple and AT&T COLLECT MONEY FOR.

JAVA & Flash already run on 'lesser' platforms than the iPhone. So it's just hurdles and roadblocks that Apple is throwing at Sun and Adobe to prevent them from delivering content on the iPhone without Apple and AT&T collecting money for everything.