Ex-Genius

Why You Can Expect To NEVER See Flash on iPhone OS

I’m sure it’s something you’ve cursed Apple’s name for not adding with each update to iPhone OS. It’s an addition to your iPhone or iPod touch that would “complete” the device in your opinion. Yet, with each additional OS update (or product), Adobe’s Flash technology is missing. There’s a reason for this.

Flash is buggy. Really buggy. It’s the number one reason a Mac will crash, and the number one reason Safari will unexpectedly quit. TUAW also reports on a bug that is sixteen months old. SIXTEEN months. That is an unacceptable amount of time to fix an outstanding bug within software. Imagine if Apple released an update to iPhone OS, and it contained a bug that erased all of your contacts every time you ended a call. Imagine if they didn’t fix that bug for over TWO years. This is exactly why Apple does not add Flash support to the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

Apple is a company that thrives it’s software on 3 things: Usability, simplicity and stability. One line that Steve Jobs uses in every keynote address is “it just works”. They have a constant demand that their products are very stable. Even though they can’t really control what gets developed for the Mac by third party developers, they sure can and always will with their mobile devices. It’s all about the experience to Apple, and poorly managed software like Flash will hurt that experience. Working for Apple at it’s Genius Bars, people literally lose faith in a product very quickly, even an Apple one, from software related issues. Apple is just making it’s products as best it can, not only to sell more of them, but to keep customers in the long run.

So instead Apple has adopted HTML5. HTML5 allows for the same experience you get from Flash, but that doesn’t require a plug-in installed into a browser to get the same results. The internet will and already has started to adopt HTML5. Flash is on the out, as weird as that sounds. Its an age-old technology that even YouTube and Vimeo has begun to move on from. They have already turned on HTML5 video tags.