The moment flash was announced for the Android I realized that my next phone won't be an iPhone, but a nexus one.
Sad. History is repeating itself.
Sad. History is repeating itself.
Other than the occasional restaurant website, what are you missing? Most flash apps are very awkward on a phone, having been designed for a mouse. And most flash games apparently don't perform remotely acceptably on Android (not enough horsepower in the phone).
The remaining reason would be Hulu - but they won't stream to your phone, even with flash - since they don't have mobile distribution rights to the content.
Please, try before you judge.
The bottom line is that you have the option to use flash, or not. On the iphone, you have no option. There is no losing here.
Actually, HTML5 video playback on mobile devices is hardware-accelerated. That's the reason it works well, as opposed to this, which does not.
Canvas+JS is not accelerated on mobile devices.
But what are you missing? Flash apps and games that do work just fine. Kongregate has a mobile game site: http://m.kongregate.com/ where apparently the games run really well.
Then you have a LOT of streaming content you can view in flash (and not restricted to just the US).
Let me ask you this? Why wouldn't you want the above?
If you never really used it anyway? As you showed there are plenty of valid reasons for wanting Flash on your phone, it's just that those might not be important reasons for everyone.
If I visit 100 sites a day maybe 5 of them will be dependent on flash in some way. Menus, slideshows, etc. Without flash the site is worthless. I won't remember the 95 sites that work, but each and every one of the sites that don't will annoy me endlessly. Maybe I needed that quote on a new Dewalt powerdrill from the local website programmed in flash. Maybe I really wanted to see the funny link someone posted on twitter. But I can't. Not without flash.
The problem is a lot like spam: False positives are a serious problem. If 5 e-mails a day were mistakenly labeled as spam my spamfilter would basically be useless. This is exactly the same.
I don't endorse flash, and think it's annoying as hell but until 99.5% of the sites I visit work without flash not having it simply isn't an option.
The point is, Flash is just a small part of a big problem. Web design still has whiplash from the mobile explosion. But it's going to recover real quick, and when everyone starts making mobile friendly sites, they won't be using Flash. It's on death row and Google is just dragging it out for a cheap shot at Apple.
Just grit your teeth and bear it for a little while longer. You'll have to do that anyway, with or without Flash.
The bottom line is that the end user should be able to choose. Arguing against that is just silly. Shouldn't Apple block HTML5 since it will waste more CPU than normal sites? Other than the occasional restaurant website, what are you missing?
Have you actually used a legacy flash app on a touchscreen or are you just repeating the non-facts that Jobs has seeded on the internet?
One of the huge advantages for Apple, is that the iPhone OS does not run flash. I, and a lot of other people, do not want flash. I understand a lot of people do, but let me switch it off in the OS, and we can have the best of both worlds.