Comments on: the genius of Steve Jobs: he makes you want the lock-in

By: The Openness of Flash » pixxid

The Openness of Flash » pixxid — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:24:09 +0000

[...] to Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash post, there’s been a whole new flurry of posts on the subject of flash vs html5, this time with some focus on the issue of openness, since Steve [...]

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:50:53 +0000

Also note the lack of memory card readers on the media devices

By: Nathan Herring

Nathan Herring — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:56:55 +0000

Applications written with a cross-platform development tool _are_ starting with a handicap, and its a handicap that is usually directly related to the height of both of the platforms’ framework stacks. This makes a tremendous difference when using a cross-platform UI stack (since UI stacks tend to be large and non-homogenous), vs. a bare computing or networking stack. Having “native” UI code and cross-platform business logic seems like a fine way of not watering down the platform, and yet this is not allowed.

I can, however, still fathom a reason for maintaining (at least) a ban on the (UI) cross-platform libraries use — even if they were to hold these apps up to the “high” standards of native (UI) frameworks, they’d still be responsible for repeatedly shooting down applications for being “tacky”. The cost of dealing with those submissions and their probably repeated denials is something they can easily obviate with a stroke of their legal pen.

My only suspicion is that only Apple will decide whether or not to enforce these clauses, and that developers will continue to submit products that don’t meet the criteria of the license, and for apps/developers deemed to be helping the platform, Apple may look the other way.

By: Cris

Cris — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:30:35 +0000

All I can say as an open source developer is, ahaha suck it down app store developers. Dance with the devil, this is what happens. It’s not like it wasn’t patently obvious this was coming.

By: Alexander Fritze

Alexander Fritze — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 07:49:10 +0000

the genius of steve jobs

By: Ben Adida

Ben Adida — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:26:50 +0000

If Apple introduces incompatible changes, I don’t see how they would have to cater to Adobe anymore than to individual developers who would need to make changes to their native apps, too. And again, Apple can always yank those apps out if they are not upgraded past a certain point. Your point is by far the most valid technically of the set, but it’s still not the root issue, I don’t think.

By: Ian Levesque

Ian Levesque — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 19:11:36 +0000

“Apple already has a mechanism to control for app quality: they can reject any app for any reason. So why add this additional level of control? Why automatically reject an app that happens to be originally built using Adobe’s cross-compiler, even if that app is good?”

You addressed the first part of Job’s statement but not the second (“and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform”). Once a good application is out in the wild, users will use it, depend on it, and make decisions about upgrades based upon its compatibility. Apple has made many sweeping changes and enhancements to its SDK since it was originally released, and Adobe doesn’t have a great track record keeping up with even the Mac (Core Image in Photoshop? Someday?), which moves much slower than the iPhone does. A large portion of developers will have to wait for Adobe to add new platform capabilities, and that does hurt the iPhone platform. The need for Apple to cater to previously “good” Flash applications would become a hinderance to the progress of the platform.