Steve Jobs just wrote an essay on why Flash is “unfit” for the iPhone/iPad architecture, illuminating a new type of format war between Apple and Adobe. In his essay, Jobs employs numerous rhetorical strategies that may mislead those outside the developer stratosphere. While I am an avid mac user, I am also a long-time flash developer. Here is my critical analysis of Job’s essay.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Very slick. This is in-fact a misleading statement. Jobs leads the the reader to focus on the fact that Flash products from Adobe are closed-source, while leaving out the fact that there are plenty of alternative open-source tools from the community that create Flash files. Therefore Job’s rhetorical strategy is to focus on Adobe’s products to argue that Flash is a closed-source that is only controlled by Adobe, while leaving out the fact that there are many other open-source ways to make Flash files and that these are created by the thriving open source community.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products.
Jobs is now arguing that Apple is open-source in contrast to Adobe. This is a strikingly obvious rhetorical strategy that is designed to make Apple, a notably proprietary software firm, look like the harbinger of open-source collaboration.
Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.
This paragraph is interesting. It appears as though Jobs considers Flash applications to be an unnecessary addition to the overflowing selection within the app store. One perspective is that there is truly no need for additional applications. However, this is analogous to saying that we don’t need more movies at the video store, we already have enough. From this standpoint, its rather short-sighted for Jobs to negate the prospect of future developments or advances that Flash developers could offer and unethical for his to attempt to monopolize the app market by being anti-competitive with the Flash platform. The same logic could be used against app development all together —if there’s already enough software, why continue to develop?
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
PCWorld contacted Symantec about this in 2008. Symantec said: “When we did our testing in the lab, the latest version completely fixes the issue: No crashes, no exploits, no nothing.” Jobs is focusing on a problem in the past and makes no mention of its solution or speed of response. Apple’s software crashes too, it is a rhetorical strategy for Jobs to focus on a single problem as if it were a continuous issue.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
Jobs is implying that it is Adobe’s fault that older Flash software is slower. However, he does not offer the possibility that Apple could block older versions of Flash to encourage web developers to update their files. Regardless, he does mention that Flash has indeed updated to the latest standard that does not shorten the battery life, a point that he downplays.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. […] This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Jobs is arguing that there is no way that a Flash developer could make a great application without having access to the entire repertoire of tools offered by Apple. This negates the fact that Adobe is new to the market and may continually improve it’s software. Anyway, isn’t it up to the developer to choose what language to write their own app? It would be better to pick the most comfortable platform that allows the developer to create without having to learn a new language from the “Hello World!” level.
At the end of the day, the essay is very biased and carefully crafted to suit Job’s purpose of degrading Adobe and pushing developers towards Apple’s Xcode development platform at the expense of severely misleading the reader. While Xcode may be the choice with the most options, Adobe’s software opens the doors for the Flash development community to contribute to the growing selection of Apps and will not harm the iPhone or iPad platform standards as Jobs would very much like you to believe. I strongly recommend any reader to look at the Wikipedia entry on Anti-competitive Practices. His entire essay can be summed as “bad rhetoric, and worse ethics.”
As a further point, Apple has a history of forcing developers to develop with Apple’s development platform by preventing all other options. This goes with software, like Adobe’s, and hardware. In a previous post, I have brought to light that Apple requires third-party hardware to have a special “authorization chip” that raises the price and development headache for hardware developers. You can read more about this in a Popular Mechanics article here.
