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Comment by JamieEi | Hacker News Reader

When your OS is installed on a billion or so computers worldwide backwards-compatability is pretty important. Vista broke backwards compatability for the driver model (for excellent reasons BTW) and MS got reamed for it. It's easy to be laisse faire about backwards compatability until it is your app or your machine that is being broken.

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There is some truth to that, but there are options besides maintaining backwards compatibility to a huge extent in your products. As long as you boldly and loudly proclaim how it is being broken, there is nothing wrong with saying if you can't accept that don't upgrade. Or more recently, telling people to run that particular program in a virtual environment.

I primarily use windows, but I have a virtual machine with Linux specifically to run Sage. I know its not the same, but it is a very similar concept.

The thing is… if there are thousands of Flash apps on users' iPads, and an OS update breaks Flash, how long will it take Adobe to fix it? Or is Apple supposed to either hold up the OS or code around bugs in Flash (or other layer)?

If Apple breaks Flash because they changed their APIs in an incompatible way they would also have broken apps that used the same APIs directly. How about if Apple just stays away from breaking changes as much as possible and, if they are occasioanlly needed, communicates them well in advance so that no one gets broken?

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