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Big Steve, please explain to us why you would write a letter about why you and the AppleSoft empire does not want Flash on your platform? I think that it was to keep the propaganda in the air and to keep the company in the news. Apple is notoriously good at keeping themselves in the news, and this is classic Apple marketing. We all know that Apple writes letters to their customers when they do something lame. The same thing happened when they lowered the prices on the iPhone right after first adopters bought the thing. I am sure all of you who got fleeced remember that episode. There are a few problems with this letter unfortunately.

First, AppleSoft should never talk about openness as a good thing. It’s clear that the AppleSoft experience is to lock people into a totalitarian system and force everyone into that mold or else. Given that, it’s completely propagandist to then act as if open standards are the wave of the future. Please stop, it’s not working on those with active brains.

The full web is just that, everything on the web. Video is hardly the only use for Flash or Silverlight, and it’s a shell game to act as if it’s not the case. Also, there are sites that will not work with Safari’s browser because you turn off the ability to file upload. So, let’s not assume that video and HTML are the only things that people care about online. The fact that you wasted more than one paragraph to explain this propaganda is ridiculous.

Reliability and security is the first solid complaint levied on the Flash platform and your letter could be one paragraph long in my opinion. Flash does have security holes, and that’s because Adobe allows stupid bugs to sneak into their software. Although this is true, I have seen instances on the iPhone where an app crashes while in use. Those instances can be hijacked as well and can pose security risks to the device. When you speak about security flaws, you have to acknowledge that your developers also have bugs in their code. Stop the never-ending spin!

Battery life, again, stop spinning Jobs. The iPhone battery is not amazing as you constantly say in your keynotes. The iPhone is a device that I would not expect to last an entire day. It’s too small, has a small battery and includes a ton of radios and “always on” services. Don’t forget about the huge screen that encompasses the entire UI, that alone drains battery like a heathen. Adding Flash support in a “sand-boxed” way would not cause a problem. It could be an app for all I care, much like the way YouTube works. Nice try.

Using touch as an excuse is once again stupid. Adobe has a product that builds native code for the iPhone and includes touch support. It’s entirely ridiculous to say that Touch support is the problem when it’s not the case. That is a cop-out in the worst way.

Finally, you waste your final argument on the speed of updates from third party software. That is a fair issue when it comes to ultimate control to the platform. Using a third party application to build native code for the iPhone is not something I expected to see in this final blast. In my opinion, if the code compiles and runs on the device, it’s going to run on the device. That’s how programs I have written and used work. I haven’t seen a program get compiled and run on a device and then never runs on another similar device. What are you talking about here? If Adobe or any of the other middle-ware environments sucked, then no one would use it. Forcing developers to learn your way is just wrong and is NOT open. Also, assuming that people don’t know how B2B collaboration works is ridiculous. I know that if Adobe was on the Apple platform they would sell their soul to keep up with whatever sugar you decided to add to the devices.

It’s increasingly annoying to see the propaganda and lack of respect for the intelligence of customers that AppleSoft employs in their marketing. I have an iPhone and I have experienced problems with performance and it has nothing to do with Flash. It has nothing to do with poorly written code. It is just how the phone is from time to time. A reboot fixes some of the memory issues, which leads me to believe that there are memory leaks. That kind of thing happens in complex OS installs. Stop trying to make the public more ignorant than they already are. AppleSoft, please be more like you were in the time of the 1984 commercial.

Tags: Dumb