Comments on: Apple banning Flash applications from iPhone 4.0? That stinks.

By: Andrew Hopkins

Andrew Hopkins — Sun, 30 May 2010 23:28:45 +0000

Apple don,t want flash on the iPhone because it will enable millions of there users to go and get play free games and videos and music, and that would stop there potential user buying form there app store or iTunes, meaning they will lose out on loads of money

it relay that simple

and apple just want to be number one

and the fact that adobe have figured out a way to get flash in a bit of a way on the iPhone has pissed them off even more, so they want to blow there own trumpet and say no no to that one to

i really hope apple will see the light on this one and realize that flash is a bloody good idea and let it work on there devices as every other manufacture will be doing so very very soon, making apple just look a bit stupid .

i just want a future where all devices can work in harmony together in a happy fluffy internet land

By: Niclas Lindgren

Niclas Lindgren — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 14:08:43 +0000

Mason: There is a huge difference in what Apple is doing. For Android and WM7 you can write your application in any language of your choice and crosscompile it to C#/CLI in anyway you like with any number of middleware and then compile that with your supported tool chain(this is what MonoTouch, Adobe and Unit3D are doing). Though Steve is right about middlewares, they tends to make things wrose than they have to be, but MonoTouch for instance tie directly the the platform, directly to the UI core of the phone, there is no translation layers, only the busienss logic has an abstraction, which seems sane, develop multiple UIs, reuse your business logic.

The only thing that Adroid and WM7 is limiting is that they only support/produce programming tool chain, but they don’t stop you from making your own. At least not yet, MS seems to be copying iPhone alot so perhaps they copy the license too..

By: Mason Wheeler

Mason Wheeler — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 20:03:12 +0000

To people suggesting other phones, bear in mind that the alternatives are no better. For the Windows 7 phone, everything is Silverlight. For the Android, everything has to be in Java. Where are the open platforms? Where’s the freedom of choice? Where is the computer owners’ rights law banning this kind of thuggery from computer designers in the first place?

By: José

José — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:10:08 +0000

Dion Almaer in Twitter 4 hours ago: “The Web continues to be the only viable has non-single-vendor-owned platform that can be ubiquitous cross the devices of today and tomorrow”
Perhaps people affected by the new Apple restriction start to target the iPhone with mobile webapps? BTW, it was Apple’s original idea

By: Stefan Richter

Stefan Richter — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 08:47:10 +0000

iPhone is so last year. Time to move on.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:31:08 +0000

Sure. Apple great, Adobe bad. What is the problem here? All the other phone manufacturers are adding Flash 10. Apple can’t figure it out? Too complex? Hum. I am a loyal iPhone owner, and I can tell you that 85% of the Top 100 websites display in Flash, and most websites in the next 5 years will be built on Flash. So … how do you solve this problem? It is called the Windows7 Phone. Bye AT&T and bye Apple.

As soon as that product is out, I am gone. Steve and his “not invented here” leadership style will be a thing of the past. I was never an Apple fan. The iPhone was nearly perfect so I bought it. But now I know why I don’t like Apple. They tell us what we get to use and what we get to see on THEIR phone. Sad.

By: FooBarista

FooBarista — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 23:24:05 +0000

@Joshua, when you say “Cross compilers have always been a pretty terrible solution” do you realize that Apple’s own compilers for the iPhone and the iPad are actually *cross compilers*? And you realize that every embedded system development is done with a *cross compiler*, including such things as the PS3, the Xbox and the Wii?

Nitpicking aside, the fact that other languages exist today and consume existing libraries, frameworks and APIs is a proof that there is no requirement that one writes code in the same language that the library, framework or service was written in.

Windows was written in C, you can still use anything else you please; Linux was written in C, you can still use anything else you please; MacOS is written in C and you can still use anything else you please.

Higher-level frameworks? The same, in OSX there is a massive community of Python, Ruby, Pascal and other languages that use the Objective-C libraries.

Then again, there are people that can not think outside the box. People limited by their own imaginations.

By: Matthew Fabb

Matthew Fabb — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:36:09 +0000

I don’t know exact numbers but there seemed to be a lot of 3D iPhone games made with Unity3D, since publishing was introduced in 2008. Some even made for big name brands, like the Star Wars iPhone game:
http://unity3d.com/support/resources/unite-presentations/bringing-star-wars-to-the-iphone.html

I had yet to hear about any complaints performance in Unity3D iPhone games, and since it seemed to be a safe way to go, quite a number of companies made significant investments in this area. Now if Apple actually follows up with the ban, I feel bad not just for those companies, but the developers who could lose their jobs now.

This is certainly very wide reaching beyond Adobe, but it remains to be seen if Apple will successfully screen apps made with other environments.

By: Duncan Smart

Duncan Smart — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:17:46 +0000

@Joshua – “…use native frameworks…” Monotouch *does* use the native frameworks. It meant you weren’t tied to coding in atrocious Objective-C.

By: Joshua Ochs

Joshua Ochs — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 22:03:06 +0000

Sound and fury. Cross compilers have always been a pretty terrible solution (hugely inefficient, poor non-native interfaces, and lowest common denominator designs), and Apple doesn’t like terrible solutions. As seen with copy/paste and multitasking, they’d much rather do without than make do. Cross compiling Flash is definitely “make do”, and Apple has made no secret for years that Flash, Java, and similar platforms have no place on the iPhone. Adobe tried to pull an end-run, and Apple said no. Not exactly unexpected.

This will certainly strand a few folks, but if you were using a cross compiler to make an iPhone app, you weren’t exactly committed to the platform in the first place. If you have any serious interest – technical, business, or financial – in the platform, you’re going to use native frameworks. If you can’t be bothered to even do that much, then you’re not much of a developer and you won’t be missed. Furthermore, you weren’t going to make a cutting edge product anyway – cross-compilers emphasize lowest common denominator development. No big loss.

As for Apple being “closed”? Don’t like Objective-C, XCode, and all that? Then use HTML5 and go nuts. THAT is an open standard, and performance and functionality is only getting better and broader support. Look at the recent Quake2-in-a-browser or the iAd infrastructure. You can do a hell of a lot with HTML5 (a little freakish when you think of the origins of HTML), and that will work anywhere – iPhone, Chrome, Firefox, and eventually IE9. Need more? Write an app – a native app, one that’s not going to be wasting performance and memory on a hackish cross-compiler.

I’m sure we’ll have a half dozen folks like Wayne above who will stamp their feet and leave – and it won’t make a whit of difference. 99.99% of apps and their developers are unaffected by this, which means end users are unaffected, which means that fundamentally – no matter if its anti-competitive, a dick move, or whatever – It. Just. Doesn’t. Matter.

If you tied your livelihood and prospects to Flash, you’re tied to the mast of a sinking ship. Start learning new technologies and move on, or go down with the ship.