Steve Jobs's Prophetic Thoughts on Flash

In April 2010, Apple.com posted another open letter from Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Flash.
It at one time made many think about the viability of this technology.

Link to the original letter: Thoughts on Flash
Translation:

The relationship between Apple and Adobe has been around for many years. We met the founders of Adobe in their conditional garage. Apple became the company's first major customer by using their Postscript language in its Laserwriter printers. Apple invested in Adobe and for many years owned 20% of the company. The two companies worked closely in the direction of desktop publishing, and much more was done. Since that golden age, the company's paths began to diverge. Apple was near death at some point, and Adobe was embroiled in the enterprise market with its Acrobat products. Today, both companies are still working together to jointly serve their “creative” customers — Mac users who buy about half of the Adobe Creative Suite products — but we also have few common interests.
I want to briefly outline some of our thoughts on Adobe Flash products, so that our customers and critics better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhone, iPod and iPad. Adobe claims our solution is driven by business logic — they say that we want to protect our App Store — but in fact, the problem is at a technological level. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.

For starters, the topic is “open”
Adobe Flash products are 100% owned by the company. They are available only from Adobe, and Adobe has full control over their future enhancements, pricing, and so on. Although Adobe Flash products are widespread, this does not mean that they are open, as they are completely controlled by Adobe and are available only from Adobe. By any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Apple also has many products that belong to it. Despite the fact that the operating system for iPhone, iPod and iPad belongs to Apple, we are convinced that all standards related to the web should be open. Instead of using Flash, Apple opted for HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript — all open standards. All Apple mobile devices come with high-performance and low-energy implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many other companies, allows web developers to create applications with advanced graphics and typography, animation and transitions, regardless of third-party browser modules (like Flash). HTML5 is fully open and managed by a committee of which Apple is a member.

Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple started with a small open source project, and created WebKit, a fully open rendering engine for HTML5, which is the basis for the Safari browser used in all of our products. WebKit is widespread. Google uses it in the Android browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced that it will use it. Almost all web browsers on smartphones, except the Microsoft browser, use WebKit. By making WebKit open, Apple has set a new standard for mobile web browsers.

Secondly, there is the theme of “the whole web”.
Adobe has repeatedly stated that Apple’s mobile devices cannot access “the entire web,” because 75% of video on the web is played via Flash. But what they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and it can be viewed on iPhone, iPod and iPad. YouTube, with its 40% share of the video market on the web, shines in the application, which is available on all Apple mobile devices, and the iPad probably offers the best way to detect and watch videos on YouTube. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPS, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic and many, many more . IPhone, iPod, and iPad users don't miss that many videos.

Another statement by Adobe is that Apple devices do not allow you to play games on Flash. It's true. Fortunately, the App Store has over 50,000 games and entertainment applications, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment apps for the iPhone / iPod / iPad than for any other platform in the world.

Thirdly, the issue of reliability, security and performance.
Symantec recently pointed out that in 2009, Flash had the worst security issues. We also know first hand that the number one reason for application crashes on the Mac is Flash. We are working with Adobe to fix these problems, but it has been going on for several years. We do not want to reduce the reliability and security of the iPhone, iPod and iPad by adding Flash there.

In addition to this, Flash with performance on mobile devices is not very good. Over the past few years, we have repeatedly asked Adobe to demonstrate high Flash performance on a mobile device, on any mobile device. So we never had a chance to see it. Adobe has publicly announced that Flash will appear on smartphones in early 2009, and then in the second half of 2009, then in the first half of 2010, and now they say it will happen in the second half of 2010. We think that in the end he will come out, but we are glad that we did not wait for him. Who knows what he will have there with productivity.

Fourth, the issue of battery life.
To achieve good battery life when playing video, mobile devices need to decode the video in hardware; software decoding uses too much energy. Many processors used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264, the industry standard used by every Blu-ray player, and adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Despite the fact that support for H.264 has recently been introduced in Adobe Flash, video on almost every Flash website currently requires an older generation decoder, which is not supported on mobile chips, and therefore decoding must be done programmatically. The difference is very significant: on the iPhone, for example, H.264 can play up to 10 hours, while video, decoded by software, play less than 5 hours until the battery is completely discharged.

When websites transcode their videos using H.264, they will be able to provide them without using Flash. They play great in browsers like Apple Safari and Google Chrome without any modules, and look great on iPhone, iPod and iPad.

Fifth, there is a Touch issue
Flash was created for computers that have a mouse, but not for touch screens with finger controls. For example, many Flash sites use the “roll-over” element, which displays a menu or other elements when you hover over a specific location. Apple's revolutionary touchscreen interface does not use a mouse, and there is no “rollover" concept. Most Flash websites would still have to be rewritten to add support for touch-enabled devices. If developers somehow rewrite their Flash sites, why not use modern technologies such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Even if there was Flash on the iPhone / iPod / iPad, this would not solve the problem that most Flash sites need to be rewritten to support touch-enabled devices.

Sixth, most important reason.
In addition to the fact that Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, it has major technological flaws and does not support touch control devices, there is an even more important reason why we do not allow Flash on iPhone / iPod / iPad. We discussed the disadvantages of using Flash to play video and interactive content on websites, but Adobe also wants developers to use Flash to create applications that will run on our mobile devices.

From painful experience, we know that the admission of third-party software layers between the platform and developers ultimately leads to applications that do not meet the standards, and inhibits the development and progress of the platform. If developers depend on third-party libraries and development tools, they can use platform improvements if (and only when) this side decides to apply new features in their libraries and tools. We cannot count on third parties who will decide when they make available (and whether they will apply at all) our improvements for third-party developers.

The situation gets even worse if a third party provides cross-platform development tools. A third party may not apply the enhancements to one platform until they become available on all supported platforms. Therefore, developers will have access to only the “least common denominator” in terms of application capabilities. Again, we cannot accept situations where developers are not able to use our innovations and improvements just because they are not available on competitor platforms.

Flash is a cross-platform development tool. And Adobe has no goal of helping developers create better apps for the iPhone / iPod / iPad. Their goal is to help developers create cross-platform applications. And Adobe painfully slowly introduces improvements to its Apple platforms. For example, despite the fact that Mac OS X has been on sale for almost 10 years, Adobe just now completely came to it (using Cocoa) - two weeks ago, releasing CS5. Adobe was the last major third-party developer to fully utilize Mac OS X technology.

Our motivation is simple - we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best applications in the world. We want to constantly improve the platform so that developers can create even more wonderful, powerful, funny and useful applications. Everyone benefits from this - we sell more devices because we have better applications, developers reach a larger audience and increase the number of customers, and users are constantly happy about the best and widest selection of applications among platforms.

Conclusion
Flash was created during the PC era - for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we understand why they want to push it outside of the PC. But the mobile era is devices with minimal power consumption, touch interfaces and open web standards: these are areas where Flash has weak points.
An avalanche of media companies that offer their content for Apple's mobile devices shows that Flash is no longer a necessity for watching videos or consuming some kind of web content. And 200 thousand applications in the Apple App Store prove that Flash is not needed for tens of thousands of developers to create applications full of graphics, including games.

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and on PC too). Perhaps Adobe needs to focus more on developing great HTML5 tools, and less criticize Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

Some did not give due importance to this letter, believing that Flash will live, no matter what. Probably because Flash is a powerful development product that has a huge consumer market and a great demand for applications. But in an era of rapid technological development, the main criterion in choosing such products is speed and openness.

Adobe will soon say goodbye to Flash technology. An ad on behalf of the company said Adobe would encourage content creators to use new web standards. For example, HTML5. In the meantime, the company intends to gradually withdraw Flash from circulation.
The company also introduced its new product for developing HTML5 content Adobe Animate CC.