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Comment by stevenwei | Hacker News Reader

"Luh was also formerly employed by Apple on the Final Cut Pro team. He said that because Adobe’s Flash Packager didn’t use Apple’s toolchain to create apps, the resulting code would not work well on an iPhone or iPad. A simple "Hello World" app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone would take up 8 MB, he said, when it should be no longer than a few KB. (Wired.com verified this figure with two other developers who have tested the iPhone Packager tool in CS5.)"

8 MB for a simple binary? Really? That alone is almost enough justification for me. I frequently end up downloading apps directly via my iPhone - a massive increase in download time for no actual gain in value would hurt the experience.

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That's weird - I see 3.6 MB, not 8 MB, when I click into the article (Apr 30, 3:24 EST):

"A simple “Hello World” app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone is substantially larger in file size, and it would take up 3.6 MB when it should be no larger than 400K when made with Xcode, according to James Eberhardt, a mobile developer who has tested iPhone Packager."

Funny, they must have changed the quote in the past hour or so. 3.6 MB is still pretty bad though :)

It's an edge case. No one is going to be deploying a Hello World App to the App Store. Try comparing code size for similar applications and then we might have something to talk about. Otherwise, this is poor argument.

Are you saying that a typical Flash app would be smaller, or a typical iPhone app would be larger?

I don't know which would be larger/smaller -- I'm saying that the size of a Hello World App is irrelevant.

I think you can safely say any Flash iPhone app is going to be larger than the Hello World app. The only issue in question is how much larger.

Again, the Hello World App is entirely irrelevant -- the question is whether a real world Flash iPhone app will be substantially larger than a native iPhone app that does basically the same thing.

To clarify the point with an example, a one line hello world python script when compiled down to an executable on Windows takes about 7 mb of space because of the runtime payload. But, a more complex 1000 line script wouldn't take up much more space - maybe 7.2 mb

Well, here's a few examples from the apps on my iPhone:

Tweetie 2 (very full featured twitter client): 2.8MB

Things (todo list manager): 983KB

Strategery (game, simple graphics): 6.3MB

Canabalt (game, slightly fancier graphics): 8.8MB

iOctocat (github browser): 749KB

Prowl (internet notification client): 351KB

Simplenote (Note taking, iPhone/iPad universal version): 853KB

Edit:

A cursory run-through of the flash apps listed by Adobe http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/ indicates that they're all approximately 10-11MB.

MTV's South Park Avatar Creator is 9.3MB. Three other avatar creators that seemed similar in the appstore averaged about 6.5MB. Not a very scientific comparison, admittedly.

I wouldn't be surprised that they're bigger as it's generated code. Still, it doesn't seem to me like flash apps are going to eat up all your available app storage space.

I don't think app storage space is the problem.

I would still rather have a large download than no download. Adding flash wouldn't hurt anything, it would simply enable some more developers into the iPhone space.

> Adding flash wouldn't hurt anything

Remember that "software decoding + crash problems" bit? It certainly would cause harm.

And Apple's not concerned about bringing more developers to the iPhone, they're concerned about bringing _great_ developers to the platform. It's never really been about numbers with Apple, anyway.

EDIT: I'm also not saying that Flash developers are bad, and that they shouldn't make things for the iPhone. I'm just saying that Apple's not playing a numbers game, they're playing a quality game. I'm sure Apple would love for all Flash devs to start making apps with Objective C.

meh... I'd pick quality over quantity any day...

Unless you didn't have enough to choose from; that is, you were drastically deficient in quantity.

That's one thing the iPhone App Store isn't.

> Adding flash wouldn't hurt anything

Not adding it doesn't hurt anything either

The Flash-compiled apps would not be nearly so big if Apple allowed shared libraries to be installed once and loaded dynamically, instead of forcing them to be statically linked into each and every app that uses them, thus bloating app size with redundant code.

But that's crazy talk -- it's not like iPhone OS is an Unix with several[1][2][3] well-defined and proven extension mechanisms, or anything...

[1] http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Develop...

[2] http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/CoreFou...

[3] http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/MacOSX/...

Then Apple would have to trust that Adobe (or other 3rd party library developers) will never introduce regression bugs in their dynamic library, and never break the ABI, otherwise you risk that an update in a library will break lots of existing apps.

That is what library versioning is for. One app uses X version, Y app uses another. The worst case scenario is that it would be just the same as the current static library memory usage we have now.

All risk could be removed if an app could only use a specific version of a library I guess (even a bugfix micro release can introduce regressions). However, adding support for 3rd party libraries would add quite a bit of complexity to the app store, since each app would have to include information about which external libraries it uses, and when downloading an app, iPhone OS would also have to download all the external libraries, if not already installed.

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