Why Flash on iPhone Does Not Make Sense

So there are two arguments in this article. The first is that Flash makes development and bug fixing harder because you rely on someone who is a Flash expert to fix any bugs, and from anecdotal experience the author was working on a team with no Flash programmers, so that was then a bottleneck. Part of his argument then is that if you want a rich application on the iPhone you can just make an iPhone application. Yet that has the exact same problem if you don't have good iPhone developers in house. The argument of "this technology is hard when you don't have programmers that know it" seems pretty ridiculous and would even apply if I wanted to write HTML apps but my team only knew Fortran.

The second argument is that Flash apps don't scale well to different resolutions. As a Flash developer I think this is simply false. There's no basis for the argument, you can make Flash apps scale in whatever way you want, and you have completely control over nice fluid layouts (at least with Flex you do, but you can do a lot with non-Flex Flash too).

If part of the argument is really that you don't want to have to develop different versions of your app for different devices (in this case he worries about resolution), then Flash is a clear winner, since that will let you develop the same codebase that can be used across any Android/RIM/non-iPhone phone. Sure, you'll have to rework parts of the UI to accommodate different screen sizes, but that's just a part of mobile development. Anyone who thinks you can design a mobile app for very different devices with different resolutions without reworking the main UI is simply naive, regardless of technology choice.

A repost but Daniel Eran Dilger of RoughlyDrafted has a very cogent perspective on most things Apple.

"Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices...

And you thought the iPhone was just Apple's way of muscling into the mobile business! No, it’s really a proactive battle against a wide swatch of proprietary platforms promising to plague a new wave of mobile devices."

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...

" With different mobile phones and different resolutions, you would need to write different Flash applications to be really usable on different resolution phones"

Flash Application scale very easily on different screen resolution... what he is talking about?

I smell fear.

The iPhone app development community must be trembling in its boots as CS5 gets closer. In just a matter of time, anyone with a computer and some elementary Flash skills is going to have an Apple dev account and will be submitting apps to the app store that they made in Flash.

There will be so many apps that the indie-game developer or small business iPhone app development company won't be able to make any money because the amount of free-app competition will be overwhelming.

Hell, it's going to suck for the consumer too. There will just be too much in the app store. Too much crap to filter through, too many poorly built apps to the point that downloading apps will be a chore. We'll need to try 20 before we find one jem.

Oh the humanity. When Flash apps start entering the app store, a lot of businesses will come crumbling down.

At least now there's the Objective-C learning-curve barrier, and you have to have a Mac. For Android, it's Java. But Flash. Oh man, a few hundred bucks later and anyone can create something.

I wonder how many Towers of Hanoi games the app store will have as the new Flash developers finish their tutorials and then try to sell their app?

You're right, Flash on iPhone doesn't make sense. specifically it doesn't make cents for Apple.

Apple explicitly forbids electronic distribution of content in apps which compete against iTunes. There will never be a Hulu or Netflix or Amazon Mp3 app.

Enabling Flash on the iPhone would open the doors to allowing people to watch Hulu, Netflix, and play almost as many games they want for free. That is the main reason why iPhone and iPad will not support Flash.

blah..

The only reason the iPhone does not support flash is so that the app store can sell more games. If the iPhone supported flash people would make flash game sites for the phone and apple would lose money in sales from its app store. It would also not be able to control these games and that would make steve sad.

You can justify [almost] any decision in hindsight.