tl;dr

John Gruber writes:

…the more I think about it, the more baffled I am that Narayen said anything specific at all. Talking about technical progress only serves to focus attention on the fact that it is Apple’s decision, and by all appearances, Apple does not want Flash on the iPhone.

He then goes on to list some reasons this can’t happen, including technical (Apple don’t want inline media in the browser for performance reasons), legal (the iPhone SDK specifically does not allow any VM type environments, which certainly disbars both Flash and Java), and commercial (Apple are quite enjoying their control of the iPhone environment and would really like to not give a chunk of it to Adobe). Clearly Apple are quite serious about this, as they went to some efforts to write a special YouTube application, including a bunch of stuff on the YouTube server end like different codecs and whatnot, entirely so they could do YouTube without doing Flash.

That said, I don’t think it’s very hard to decode what Abode are doing here. The legal problems Apple could resolve if it chose to do so by simply giving Adobe a special licence. And although the iPhone is very slow by modern computer standards, Mr Gruber himself claims that it’s is roughly on a footing with the original “Pismo” G3 Powerbook. I’m pretty sure I’d used some Flash apps on machines of that era and that they worked, perhaps not well. So I don’t think the technical argument is unsolvable.

No, the real reason Apple don’t want Adobe — or anyone else — to port Flash or Java or any of those things to the iPhone is simply control. Apple want to control what can run on the iPhone so they can sell more apps through the iTunes App Store, which is a reasonable enough thing for a commercial software/hardware vendor to want to do. There isn’t much Adobe can do to change this… except to attempt to strong-arm Apple by going directly to the iPhone users, all wounded and bruised and sincere, and saying “well, gee, guys, we wrote this real pretty Flash thing for the iPhone and all and we’d just love to give it to you for free but them nasty types at Apple just won’t let us! We know! Why don’t you just go call them and let them know what you think of that?” They are gambling that enough people want Flash on the iPhone badly enough that they’ll pressurise Apple. I wouldn’t like to call whether or not this will work — ask me in a month when I have my iPhone and can tell you if I find the lack of Flash annoying or not — but I’m sure this is what they are up to.

So I think what Adobe is up to is pretty easy to understand, and I find it vaguely odd that Mr Gruber, who is normally so goddamned sharp, finds this so mystifying.

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