Why Flash is Not on The iPad
There is a polarizing debate going on between “iPad - Flash = Epic Fail”, and “Flash is dumb/crashes/obsolete/ads/porn/who cares,” bordering on the religious. Problem is, many of the cons against Flash are the same tired HTML fanboy arguments one hears, as if by trolling force alone millions of sites will go dark overnight. There’s only one reason why Flash is not on the iPad, or the iPhone for that matter.
It’s not 3G bandwidth. If Rogers or AT&T has oversold its network capacity and cannot deliver 1/10th of its advertised 7.2Mbps with a clear signal in a major urban environment, they deserve to be taken to court for false advertising. Even then, I am on a wireless connection at home, and during peak hours the connection can slow to dial-up speeds. When that happens, I click on FlashBlock, and only click to enable the Flash content I know I want to watch. So tell me one good reason why Apple could not disable all VM plugin content by default, and enable them by a click on the little blue lego. No, I can’t think of a reason either.
It’s not performance. As Lee Brimlow, Flash evangelist for Adobe comments, Adobe is willing to work with Apple on improving the performance of the Flash Player for this mobile device, as they have with every other major manufacturer. The fact of the matter is, Apple will not let Adobe play in their sandbox. And yes, I will concede, Flash could be better engineered to run on a Mac, as John Gruber claims — but that is besides the point, because we’re talking about a completely different product and OS here. As Peter Elst mentions, “With the iPad we’re talking about a different device, a processor that clearly is capable of high performance rendering”.
It might be about the fact that Flash will allow content that cannot be sold on the App Store, but that does not hold water either. App store revenues of millions a year do not threaten a billion dollar revenue base.
There is only one reason I can think of that makes any sense why Apple would do this.
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