Flash and iPhone, Why They'll Never Get Together

Daniel Ionescu of PCWorld waxes philosophic as to why Apple hasn't jumped on the Flash bandwagon like all the other mobile phone makers. Well, maybe "waxes philosophic" is giving too much credit, rather, it's more like puts up three points that sound good, are pretty plausible, yet leave us, the readers, none the wiser. Really, because no one in the tech journalism world has any fucking clue what Apple's up to until it happens. Well, except for the few who get advance Apple products to test, like Mossberg and Pogue. But, Apple pretty much binds them up like some BDSM super fantasy before the official product launch, so we never get anything out of them.

I think the reason's pretty simple: Flash sucks, even on a fully decked out PC. It's a memory hog, eats CPU cycles like a starving kid in a candy store with a pocket full of stolen credit cards, and when it wigs out you have to reload the whole Goddamned thing. Yeah, that's an experience I want on my phone. A platform that is sluggish, bloated, and is known for crapping out even the best browsers. What, you think Google would have developed Chrome as a multi-threaded app wherein each tab runs completely independent of any other tab and the browser as a whole if Flash was stable and played well where it lives?

Flash used to be a cool thing, a nifty platform to develop some cool web-based UIs and the occasional app. It was getting bloated and unstable back when Adobe ate Macromedia, and it appears that Adobe has done nothing to correct the situation, only make it worse.

Please, Apple, do yourself and all your iPhone users a favor and keep Flash off iPhone. In fact, give it a lifetime ban. Keep it where it belongs, on second-rate mobile hardware and software platforms and on full-powered computer platforms. Apple, don't let Flash kill your HTML 5 aspirations.

Besides, I don't understand why anyone gives two shits about Flash on iPhone. Well, aside from the tech journalists who've run out of ideas and need something to write about in order to fill up space, get page hits, and generally make it sound like they know something. Honestly, journalists are nothing more than English majors who were going to write the Great American novel, but realized they had nothing to write about that would last more than 2 pages, so they went into journalism. Reality is iPhone sales are strong and growing, iPod touch sales are also growing and strong. So, really, I don't see how not having Flash on iPhone is hurting Apple one bit.¹

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1: I recognize the irony in the above. But, it's even worse for me, I'm just blogging, and not even getting paid for it. At least, though, I recognize the situation for what it is. I'm not a self-important prick because I'm a journalist. I'm a self-inportant prick because I happen to be right most of the time (by which I mean in the 90% range), which most of these "journalists" can't really say.