There’s a lot of talk lately about the newly forming battle lines in computing. Microsoft has been rendered mostly inert. The future belongs to Google and Apple, and Adobe still wants a piece of the pie. Namely, they want Flash on every device everywhere, and Apple has made it clear from the moment the iPhone became available that they want no part of it. This decision has created a lot of hurt feelings, some grumbling amongst users, and turned some (few, but some) developers away. Still, I think it’s a decision that makes sense as long as you understand what Apple has at play—and could make sense for other device vendors who want control over the perception of their platform.
First of all, why does perception matter? Well, to see why you have to understand where the Mac came from. I recently overheard someone say that to understand how Apple thinks you just need a Mac; not necessarily a new Intel Mac either. Whether it’s in a stark aluminum enclosure or a beige box, the “soul” of the machine is what matters to Apple, and it’s always been the same. And really the soul is just a set of rules (the HIG), some ideas about human interaction, and a reverence (or fanaticism) for design. These things tend to pervade everything Apple does. You know an Apple product when you see it or use it. This philosophy starts at the logic board and radiates outward to the packaging, the marketing, the stores. This kind of reverence tends to be contagious, and as a testament just look at some of the best Mac and iPhone apps. They seek to emulate and elevate the indefinable experience of using a Mac, for better or worse. Does this mean there aren’t lots of copycat apps on both of those platforms? No. Every platform will have its share of “me too” developers, and no pay wall will ever keep them all out. But the stuff that rises to the top is often very good. It makes the host platform look like the best place to be for developers, and makes the devices on the platform seem like the best choice for consumers. This is the ecosystem of the Mac and the iPhone. This is how it’s always been. It’s never going to change, and if anything these characteristics will only get stronger and more pronounced over time.
Adobe has always been a part of Apple’s success. They produced apps that designers needed to do their work, that seemed to have reverence for their work flow, and that made their lives easier. But over the years, along with all those great apps, Adobe was subtly introducing a whole lot of lock-in of their own. Things like SVG, the PDF file format and legions of other Adobe file formats—these were all designed to keep designers in the Adobe garden. And in many cases they were designed to bring end-users into the Adobe garden, too. There is no such thing as a fully open source PDF reader, after all. And the same goes for Flash.
When web standards were just something Jeffrey Zeldman was ranting about on a mailing list and no two browsers did anything alike, the only way to build apps that would behave predictably on the web was to make everyone download the Flash plugin. Flash was relatively easy to learn, simple to deploy, and pretty soon was everywhere. Advertisers discovered the rich media ad unit, and web browsing was never the same. A billion “punch the monkey” ads later, and here we are: in a world where HTML5, canvas and javascript (and much faster processors and internet connections) can do almost everything Flash once did. And the historically poor performance of the Flash Player and Flash plugin on the Mac platform made it an easy choice for exclusion from the iPhone OS. In short, Adobe is losing its edge. The old pay to play days of interactive design are coming to a close, and Adobe needs someone or something to hitch its wagon to. This is where Flash CS5 and its ability to publish apps in an iPhone executable wrapper was supposed to save the day.
There are really two ways of looking at the situation. On the one hand, this ability would allow developers who already know the Flash toolkit to build apps for the most popular handheld platform in the world. On the other hand, have you ever used a Flash app that felt as good as a native app? This, I suspect, is the core of Apple’s argument: Flash apps on the iPhone muddy the perception of the platform. They would be easy and fast to create, they would likely flood the market as a result, and they would uniformly be pretty crummy. Pretty soon, the perception of the iPhone App Store could be (brace for troll) like the Android Marketplace: full of junk with endlessly variable user interfaces and hobbyist-level performance. As the owners of the platform, Apple has a right to say ‘no thanks.’ As a developer, are you locked in to Apple’s toolchain if you want to build iPhone apps? Yep, you sure are. However, if the toolchain for developing native apps may be a lock-in, the platform as a whole is not. Things like h.264, HTML5 and JavaScript are very open and are being positioned by Apple as the lingua franca of the web, data storage, and video. In fact, that’s the very opposite of Adobe’s Flash platform, which is encumbered by patents at every level. And Apple’s is not a lousy toolchain, either. There’s more power lurking inside it than even many developers realize. It’s produced some incredible apps, and will go on producing them even though there are some limitations on who can develop them and how.
Frankly, the limitations are what keep people coming back. When you remove these limitations you get a totally different experience, one that just doesn’t have the fit and polish Apple wants for itself and wants to try and espouse to those who develop for its platforms. Having used some Android phones, and spent time trying to get my daily work done on a completely patent- and lawyer-free Linux box, I can tell you I’m happy for those limitations.
