A lot of people in the tech world are up in arms over Apple’s continued denial of Flash on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. That’s no surprise as many people love these products dearly. The problem is that their brand religion clouds their understanding of what is really going on, and loyalists have bought Apple’s red herring hook, line, and sinker.
Aside from great ads and a rabid fan base, three features made the iPhone really popular.
- Slick hardware with a user interface meant for your fingers rather than a stylus
- The App Store
- A simple product line
Most consumers don’t realize that the concept of an App Store wasn’t new. A little company called Handango has been doing this for a decade. I bought over a dozen apps back in 2005 on my trusty Sony Ericsson P910 including a very useful subway application, some impressive mobile games for the time, and even a SNES emulator.
Unfortunately this mobile revolution went virtually unnoticed until Apple realized its potential, both as a selling point and business model.
Apple’s insight, just like with iTunes, was to own the distribution channel. The manufacturers that previously built phones compatible with the Handango store had little incentive to advertise third party products. When Apple takes a 30% cut on every sale, you can bet selling software at virtually no cost to them is a priority.
This is relevant to Adobe because people would have had much less reason to go to the App Store if Apple had allowed Adobe software on the iPhone.
Flash and Flex are powerful development environments that could probably handle most things done in Objective C. Apple claims that it won’t support Flash because the software crashes or because it wants to support an open standard like HTML 5. That posture is nothing more than a red herring meant to placate critics and distract from the underlying business rationale.
Why would you download software when you could bookmark a webpage that ran Flash? Why develop custom applications when you could make something that was platform independent? Perhaps the iPhone was destined to be a success. Yet it is the App Store and the denial of Flash that made it into one of Apple’s most profitable products.
Another Apple differentiator was a simple product line that made development feasible for software companies was easy to understand for the mass market. Sony Ericsson currently produces 25 different phones for America alone. All with different processor speeds, resolutions, functionality, and versions of operating systems. Multiply that by dozens of other phone manufacturers. As a third party with limited resources, would you want to test software on hundreds of models? I doubt it. As a consumer, how can you stay loyal to a brand when you only own one model out of two dozen that are on sale at any one given moment? No one else in the mobile space except for Palm has the same focus.
Adobe’s two most recent successes are not Photoshop and Illustrator, but rather products that have thrived by overcoming incompatibility. Acrobat ensures documents play well with Mac, PC, and Linux. Flash enables cross-platform video playback and complex applications.
Adobe could still make waves in the mobile space if they can take advantage of the hodgepodge of handsets. Until other hardware manufacturers realize that less is more, Adobe has room to reclaim market share.
If they don’t, Apple will continue to dominate by forcing engineers to play by its rules and consumers who have never heard of or don’t care about Apple’s policy will decide the winner regardless of developer boycotts.
