Flash on iPhone would be a huge revenue leak | Hacker News Reader

Flash on iPhone would be a huge revenue leak

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20 pointspchristensen38 comments

Maybe Apple is just being Machiavellian...

"In any case, the iPhone is Apple's best shot at killing Flash, and Apple appears happy to be using it as such...Excluding Flash is a huge slap in the face of Adobe, which is pushing Flash as the basis of its AIR and Flex web application strategies. Adobe likes to advertise that nearly every PC has a Flash plugin installed. Suddenly, nearly every mobile that has access to the real Internet won't have Flash, making it far less attractive across the board."

"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."

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

Death of Flash, mobile Java and Silverlight... this is so awesome, go Apple go!

Between the tagline ("For Executives, Entrepreneurs, and other Digerati who need to know about SaaS and Web 2.0.") and the photo, I knew this wasn't a post worth reading.

Also, this is nice: "Java is an interpreted language. The JVM is the Java interpreter."

Also, this is nice: "Java is an interpreted language. The JVM is the Java interpreter."

Technically this is true. The JVM interprets Java bytecode in the sense that it translates the bytecode into machine language on the fly.

The JVM doesn't interpret Java, it interprets JVM bytecode. Java isn't interpreted, it's compiled to run on the JVM (or natively).

Basically, I'm in favor of a law that says "If you want to use the word compiled or interpreted in your blog post, you have to write a programming language first." That is the project you need to do to understand compiled vs. interpreted.

Yes, I agree with you of course. But I think the intended audience for this blog would be operating on a slightly looser and less academic meaning of the phrase "interpreted language," where the answer to the question, "Does a Java program get interpreted when it runs?" would be affirmative.

But so does any computer program. What do you think non-virtual machines do?

The difference is that binaries contain instructions that map directly to hardware operations, whereas bytecode is interpreted by a binary. The interpretation is an intermediate step that doesn't take place when a program runs on bare metal.

edit: Of course, it would be possible to build a machine that actually executes JVM instructions directly. It would also be possible to build such a machine for JavaScript, but if someone asks you whether JavaScript is an "interpreted language," the answer would still be affirmative, even if there are cases where it's not true.

Actually, at any given time, a large number of the "hardware" operations being passed to a modern CPU are actually being "interpreted" using the microcode implemented on the CPU itself.

Even in the case of instructions which do map directly to hardware ops, the CPU is still doing branch prediction and prefetching, which implies that the code is being examined (i.e., "interpreted") before being executed.

I'm not trying to say that performance isn't better when funneling native instructions down to the CPU; rather, just that it's worth remembering that there's really no such thing as "[running] on bare metal" any more, at least on a modern x86 ISA system.

Can we all just agree that whether or not Java is an interpreted language is not really relevant to the post? Let's direct further criticism at the arguments and conclusions rather than small technical gaffes.

I don't think anyone is claiming that Java is an interpreted language. The claim is that "interpreted language" to most managerial, non-hacker PHB types means "a language that at some point during execution requires interpretation."

I don't think non-hacker types even know what an interpreted language is. It's simply part of his explanation as to why flash would be an end run around iTunes. Even if he made a minor technical gaffe in calling Java an interpreted language or whatever (he also called Flex a language and a framework, when the language is action script right?) it's entirely irrelevant.

Anally nitpicking at that sort of thing does nothing to further discussion, and I hate to see it here so often.

I don't think non-hacker types even know what an interpreted language is.

That was actually my point. When someone doesn't know the technical meaning of a phrase, they generally assume the literal and broad meaning of it. The target audience for the original blog post presumably falls mainly into that category.

And just because something is not of particular interest to you doesn't make it anal nitpicking that "does nothing to further discussion."

It is of interest to me, it's just a minor technical mistake that has no relevance whatsoever to the overall article, and is therefore nitpicking.

While I'm no flash fanboy, I will say that the crux is dead on. Apple is all about razor blades.. They'll sell you a iPhone or an iPod and the find a way to extract lots of small dollars from the sale of music or applications for your device.

Putting a full featured version of flash on the device would be a trivial way to avoid the Apple store, load your Kongregate (or other casual app core) then you've got access to that whole development community and disenfranchise Apple in the process.

Right now as long as you're shopping the isles of wallmart (oh, Apple.com) for your applications they can insure that you get no free stuff and have to pay for everything, thus controlling the pipe and the revenue.

It's actually not the razorblade model. It used to be the exact opposite. Apple made their profit off of the razor (iPod) and gave the blades away. It was the reverse razor-blade model.

Some people think they're now profiting off of both, which is incredible.

I don't think that's really true. Apple makes more money on hardware than anything else. The iTunes Store helps sell more iPods, not as much the other way around.

I think Apple's decision to require all iPhone apps be sold through the iTunes Store is partially a matter of control. If an app is malicious or misbehaves, they can easily pull it.

It might be true, tried to find the gross revenue per unit for an iPod (unable to). However, during my investigation I did find this interesting blog post.

  http://daringfireball.net/2008/01/aapl_q1_2008

The author makes a few interesting notes about Apples Q1: * Mac sales and iPhone sales were equal * The gross revenue per iPod was $181

Also, apple made $808M on iTunes.

There is one interesting bit of foretelling in the post (written 5 months ago)

     The market for third-party software for the iPhone and iPod Touch is already big, and I expect that by this time two years from now, there will be more iPhones/iPod Touches in use than Macs. (Imagine the unit sale numbers for a $199 iPhone two years from now.)

Same could be said about Javascript. But as far as I know, IPhone has Javascript.

They have some pretty cool webapps also: http://www.apple.com/webapps/ on which you can get listed pretty easily.

I'd say webapps are still the way to go unless you need access to some hardware that isn't exposed to the browser.

Not just Javascript, but Mobile Safari has goodies to let you style web forms with iPhone UI appearance, such as sliders for toggling things on and off.

So given that there is already a huge trend away from standalone apps and towards browser apps, Apple is actually supporting that trend by making Mobile Safari apps look attractive and work well on an iPhone.

Have you tried browsing without js? Doing without flash is considerably easier. There aren't that many apps written in js either.

There have been bytecode versions of many languages for ages. Smalltalk is a language most people view as interpreted that executed bytecodes way back when. Basic "compitlers" have generated bytecodes for ages. Lisp compilers, ditto.

This definition of interpreted, that leaves Java not being interpreted is interesting, but one would have to conclude if you buy that definition not much of anything is interpreted save a few scripting langauges.

Wikipedia is absolutely on target with the definition I used for an interpreted language. It's the one I was taught when I got a CS degree. One could've argued even then that most CPU's execute microcode, and that there were even CPU's you could download new microcode to, so that was the only "one true" compiled world. But this is not the general meaning of the word.

There are tons of apps available in Flex that do all kinds of useful things that Apple will want to charge for. Javascript is an interesting case. I wonder how complete the implementation is on the iPhone and whether all apps execute fine there? Anyone have any complex Javascript to try it with?

It doesn't sound too plausible to me. It's only a revenue leak if the flash applications are going to stop people from paying money for Apps at the App store. But I think flash would mostly be used for free stuff, and would only really compete with the free Apps in the app store.

You don't think apps from apple could contain flash? I think it is more of a video battle and a lock down on interface look and feel. If we remember, Apple played this closed market approach with the desktop and look where that got them. I would hate to see them make the same mistake a decade or two later.

"Apple played this closed market approach with the desktop and look where it got them:" It got them in the position of being the ONLY company making consumer computers that still has any margins to speak of. HP, Compaq, Dell, et al are all racing each other to the bottom, trying to eke out a minimal survival on razor-thin margins.

Apple's stumbles in the 80s and 90s weren't because they failed to license MacOS, it was because Jobs was immature and shot himself in the foot, taking his company down with him. These days they couldn't possibly be doing any better, and you can bet your ass Jobs still thinks licensing MacOSX is a terrible idea.

Apple lost plain and simple because they were closed market, some things never change. You can get an early lead like that but eventually open systems and open markets win out.

It is all in the numbers. Sure there is MUCH more mediocrity when you open it up, and you can control and only allow the best in a closed market. But in the end the percentage of better systems at the upper threshold of the open system will always beat the best hand picked companies that can participate. One big reason is competition, the other is greed and laziness that comes with that.

Unless Adobe were allowed to break Flash out of the browser and store .swfs locally you would still need to load the app every time from the web. Of course you can already do the same sort of things with JavaScript. If SquirrelFish makes it to the iPhone (it would be silly not to) all JavaScript apps will receive a huge boost in performance.

Plus Flash most likely wouldn't have access to many of the features native iPhone apps do.

Jobs simply hates Flash and Java. I talked to someone who did some advertising work for Apple, and they had some Flash thing that Steve needed to approve, but supposedly he refuses to install Flash on his computer, so they had to do a screencast just for him.

There is a factual error in this article, in the razor/blades analogy. The monthly service fees for an iPhone don't just benefit the carrier; a portion of the service fees goes to Apple as well. I'm not sure what the portion is (or if that information is public) but this sort of revenue-sharing approach is now relatively common for big-name smartphones.

For the iPhone 2G it is rumored that Apple gets a monthly kickback from AT&T. For the iPhone 3G it is rumored that Apple gets over $200 upfront from AT&T and nothing after that.

But as someone else pointed out, if you make money on the razor and the blades it's not the Gillette business model.

This might be my ignorance of virtual machines, but what prevents vm authors to compile bytecode into asm??

To install ANYTHING on iPhone you need to get apple's approval and have apple distribute it for you. iPhone won't run anything without the Apple private key.

Which means if you want to install a JVM or Flash VM you need to install the VM onto iPhone apple won't let you. If you compile the Java bytecode into C-code (as GCJ does) you still have the problem of actually installing that compiled code onto the iPhone.

Not a whole lot, but compiling to the machine is a more difficult task than writing an interpreter. "Just-In-Time" VMs (Java and Flash 9 both do this) do some amount of this compilation as the program starts and executes. That lets them strike a balance between startup time(running a full compile can be quite slow) and execution speed.

The point is ability to INSTALL it. Compiling the bytecode of flash into C or whatever iPhone runs on is not the problem it can be done if necessary, its actually having anything run on the iPhone that is...

The advantage of bytecode is that it can run on any operating system/architecture, the VM will take care of executing it as binary code on whatever system it is installed on. This way you can go to youtube from any OS and if you have flash installed it works. Its not just about compiling into binary and startup times :)...

Now having said that when are the iPhone ruby and python VMs coming out?

this is silly... I think they just don't want it to suck and there probably isn't a good way to get flash to run on the iphone without sucking given the zoom in/zoom out feature in safari.

flash would not challenge a native iphone app, you wouldn't have access to all the cool iphone APIs. It would only be marginally better than a standard web app.

I don't see why anyone would want flash on their iPhone to be honest.

Video works fine on the iphone with youtube etc, and that's only really useful if you're on wifi.

Also as far as I know you can do quicktime video on the iPhone.

This argument goes into some detail about the politics:

http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/03/what-is-adobes-crystal-ball...

"So a taste of what’s next: As Apple jostles it out with Adobe as to whether Flash is going to be incorporated on the iPhone we get a glimpse of what’s at stake for all involved. Live mobile streaming is the hot potato just out of the oven. With services such as Flixwagon and Qik setting new standards, I’m pretty sure that the Adobe Flash’s crystal ball is telling them they need to be at the forefront of mobile streaming.

To grease the wheels they are removing the paid license mobile operators have been incurring worth over 50 million USD annually to Adobe to incorporate Flash in their mobile devices and teaming up with every major player in the market, in effect forcing Apple to play the Flash game or be left out in the cold."

I call BULLSHIT!

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