There are a lot of people unfairly knocking Apple for not supporting Adobe Flash on the iPad. For a device that’s still nearly two months away from hitting market, I think these complaints are very unfounded.
Yes, it’s almost a certainty that unless some miracle happens between now and April, the iPad isn’t going to support Flash out of the gate, but I believe anyone that thinks the iPad isn’t going to ever support Flash is mistaken.
Apple has their reasons for not allowing Flash on the iPhone, and some of them are justified. Any iPhone user will tell you that battery life is already an issue with the device, and flash could make it a lot worse. Flash also allows developers to bypass the App Store and run applications directly on the phone which also violates Apple’s current terms of service.
I won’t get deep into the whole App Store “walled garden” debate in this post, but Apple’s closed nature on the iPhone has kept the handset virus-free. There have also been no widespread problems caused by sketchy apps; something that could potentially happen if the approval process wasn’t so militant. I’m not saying that their closed-system is a good thing, but it isn’t all bad. Besides, it’s Apple’s store and whether we like it or not, they can do what they want with it.
Don’t let Apple’s history with the iPhone lead you to believe things will be the same with the iPad. This is a new category of devices with an extremely fast processor and a heavy-duty battery. Not only do I expect Apple and Adobe to find some way to bring Flash support to the iPad, I also expect to see background applications on it as well – something that the iPhone & iPod Touch still doesn’t support.
The bottom line is Apple really wants the iPad to be a success. Ultra-portable computing is the wave of the future and Apple wants to dominate that market the same way they are dominating the smartphone market. Steve Jobs isn’t dumb – he knows that Flash is too big a part of the browsing experience to not support it. Now that the shroud of secrecy behind the iPad has been lifted, I fully expect the two companies to start talking about how to bring Flash to the iPad in a way that makes everyone happy.
If they don’t, it’s not really accurate for Apple to make the claim that browsing the web on the iPad is the best experience there is.
Update: It appears that Steve Jobs addressed the issue of Flash in a town hall that occurred a couple of days back. Reports are starting to leak out that Jobs has in fact cited the buggy nature of Flash as the main reason it’s yet to appear in the iPhone OS. Jobs also seems to be placing a lot of stock in HTML 5 as a way to move away from Flash. HTML 5 is a great thing and is going to push the web forward greatly, I just wonder if it will do it quick enough where Apple can get away with never supporting Flash. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
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