iPad Flash decision: bad blast from the past
Reviews for Apple’s iPad are all over the place. Personally, I feel that tablets have tried and failed enough times in the general consumer market to call the concept dead. iPad will likely find adoption in the same niche’s as its predecessors: hospitals and other similar venues where it can effectively replace a manilla folder of documents.
Instead, I find the lack of Flash support more interesting to consider. This seems like a terrible omission for a device that Jobs touts as “the best browsing experience you’ve ever had” (around 0:30). I don’t know about you, but *my* browsing experience would be far less than perfect without access to the de facto standard video streaming technology.
The decision was apparently made due to compatibility problems…
Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.
That may be where the web world is headed, but the iPad is entering a market nowhere near that reality. This just screams classic Apple mindset. They may share the mantra “Everyone else’s stuff is crap” with Microsoft, but Apple tacks the phrase “and that’s why you can’t use it,” onto the end.
I thought that Apple had figured out the market, how to balance a closed platform in order to maintain stability and skyrocket profitability. The Flash decision definitely throws that balance off kilter, and now I’m curious to see if they’ll fall back into the decision-making style of the PC wars in the late 80’s and early 90’s (Note to the kiddies: Mac wasn’t always “cool.” They lost a lot of weight and their acne cleared up just as you entered buying age).
They can get away with dictatorial control over platforms like the iPod and iPhone because they are very focused devices. However iPad is a closer technical cousin to the laptop than the smartphone, and the last few years of App Store and iTunes revenue may be skewing their vision on this one.
My gut tells me they are using iPad to push public perception away from Flash and toward HTML5. There’s no way they’ll make such a play on the Mac platform, but the iPad offers very controlled environment to test the waters. If people (continue to) complain, they’ll publish the iPad Flash patch that they’ve already got sitting on the shelf. Trust me, it’s there.
Update: This image sums up the problem for me quite nicely.
Data security without software or hardware
I disagree. I think a goal of “let’s push HTML5″ would be a nice lofty excuse, for sure, but I think the real decision here came from the bottom line.
What happens, when app developers decide they’re tired of the hoops they’ve been jumping through to have their work listed in the App Store? What happens when instead they simply decided to do their work in Flash, and make it freely accessible via the web? App Store profits tank.
I think the issue here is a lot more to do with Apple trying to squeeze out any means by which the App Store can be effectively subverted at scale. Sure, a few devs out there will use HTML5. But they’ll be largely ignored, and the 95% will continue to go to the App Store to – and here’s the key – *purchase* their software.
So the goal is to force more App development? Instead of just “browsing the web,” per se, they are using apps to do the stuff that’s left by holes of Flash?
I guess I can see that, but a hardware vendor going up against an install base of any software package is a tall order. Then, when you consider the prevalence of the Flash technology, it seems ridiculous.
So it’s certainly possible that’s what they were thinking, but that seems even more foolish than my hypothesis, IMO.
Agreed entirely. In the meantime, people are doing things like writing a SWF parser in pure javascript just to get around the restriction: http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon
Unfortunately for Apple (and fortunately for us), they don’t get to dictate what people will and won’t view on their computers, phones, etc., no matter how hard they try.
All true, and I’m sure geeks everywhere are saying the same things. I know I am.
But keep in mind that Apple focuses on the non-techy crowd, most of whom don’t have the first clue how to break closed systems. In that sense, the market reaction is far more important than what a couple of propeller heads like us would do (’cause we’d do it regardless).
I can almost understand their desire to keep things tied down in a mobile phone market, so that the phone doesn’t get viruses and is stable enough to always make emergency calls, etc., but on a tablet I find it completely unacceptable to have those kinds of restrictions.
Maybe once Gen 2 is out or it’s jailbroken, I’ll consider it. I love my … See MoreAppleTV now that it runs boxee, otherwise it would have been an utterly worthless purchase, doing nothing except playing a few small videos and some MP3s on my TV.
Those restrictions are definitely going to be their biggest adoption hurdles. Beyond of course the fact that tablets have tried and failed, like, 3 generations now.
I doubt I’ll ever get one, for the reasons laid out at the start of the article. For being a tech guy, I’m pretty anti-gadget. I guess the knowledge just lets me see through the BS and consider how a given device would actually help make my life easier.
I’ll likely get one for the office for development purposes, even though I’ll secretly loathe it. But if it its jailbroken, it could have a lot of potential. We’ll see.