iPhone Fans: No Flash Player For You
Rumors of a Flash Player on the iPhone have been growing in volume lately, but Steve Jobs rather harshly rejected the idea during a recent Apple shareholder meeting. Jobs dismissed the idea of putting Adobe’s Flash Player on the iPhone, saying that the desktop Flash Player “performs too slow to be useful” and the mobile version “is not capable of being used with the web.”
Of course how many iPhone users actually care about Flash is debatable, and it’s absence probably isn’t hurting sales. In fact, the lack of Flash on the iPhone would be less notable were it not for the fact that Jobs has repeatedly promised Apple fans that the iPhone would deliver “real Web browsing to a phone.”
In fact the company’s iPhone webpage specifically says that Mobile Safari on the iPhone “lets you see web pages the way they were designed to be seen.”
That’s nearly true, what happens when you embed a movie from Vimeo or another sharing site? The absence of a Flash player on the iPhone means that anyone visiting your site with Apple’s mobile Safari won’t see your embedded YouTube, Vimeo and Revver content. And that makes Apple’s claim of showing “web pages the way they were designed to be seen,” an outright lie.
You’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s disappointed the latest all-Flash monstrosity of a website won’t load on their iPhone — an all-Flash website is the blink tag of web 2.0.
But the Adobe technology has found its web niche — embedded video — and without it the iPhone is missing out.
That, as Apple apologist John Gruber points out, Google’s Android also appears to lack Flash support, doesn’t get Apple off the hook. It merely means that Android too will offer a sub-par web experience.
On the brighter side, while Flash may not be part of it, Jobs did promise that the coming developer SDK will mean “you’ll see a lot of applications out there this summer.”
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