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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Flash wouldn't murder the iPad, it would murder the appstore, and that's why you won't see it on any apple mobile devices.

The battery life issues are something that could easily be taken care of with some optimizations.

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So Flash on OSX has been complete crap for years because...? And you want me to believe that "oh, on the iPad/iPhone it will be different" because...? Oh, right, 10.1 will fix all sorts of problems that couldn't be fixed for years because...?

Mostly because of inaccessible layers of code, not much to do with Adobe, more to do with apple. If apple would open up some of the lower layers then this stuff could get a lot faster.

And how is it that other third party software mysteriously has access to APIs that Flash allegedly doesn't? For example, MPlayer is able to offload work to the GPU.

Flash wouldn't kill the app store any more than html5 will.

Exactly. Remember how it would be a disaster if we could install non-approved apps because they would take out the cell network? Somehow that has failed to happen despite millions of Android phones capable of running apps from anywhere.

Not to mention all the BlackBerrys, Windows Mobile phones, and Symbian phones that have been running "unapproved" apps long before the iPhone apps store ever existed. All the apps running on those phones never caused any havoc for the cell phone networks.

Relying on client side security in a cell phone network would border on criminally stupid anyway.

Murder the App Store? How so? I'm always confused by such statements. They don't seem to make any sense. Enlighten me.

Games are a big part of the App Store and if tons of Flash games existed it would reduce that market substantially for games in the App Store.

Exactly. A large amount of the stuff in the app store is fluff that is already available for flash, and plenty of the 'apps' are re-writes for the iphone platform of existing .swf files. That's what makes it worth to the users to pay for them, the fact that they're not available for free through an alternative channel. A large part of the app stores market would dry up overnight if flash support were added to the iphone as an out-of-the-box feature.

That's a stupid definition of murder.

I agree, but it wasn't my title...

And how exactly would keyboard + mouse Flash games would work with accelerometers and multiple intermittent cursors work?

Even if the Flash player was a pinnacle of engineering, the existing content doesn't make any sense for the context.

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