Why iPhone hates flash?

 

While some version of Flash Lite is available on millions of phones, it’s conspicuously absent on the iPhone.

Many reasons have been floated for why Flash isn’t a good match for the iPhone: it’s slow, it hogs CPU cycles, it drains the battery, it crashes too often, it’s not optimized for Mac OS X and so on. As obvious as these reasons may be, even if all those technical issues could be solved tomorrow, there would still remain a huge divide between Adobe and Apple on the iPhone: who controls the UI?

To put Flash on the iPhone Adobe may:

• strike a deal to license Apple’s entire iPhone UI controls and interaction patterns and ship them with Flash, Flex and AIR development suites as components, much like its current default set “Halo.” Apple hasn’t yet shown any inkling that it’s willing go along with this.

 

• decide to duplicate the iPhone UI and ignore a legal threat from seriously irked Apple IP lawyers. (For a company that once sued Macromedia for UI infringement that would be supremely ironic.)

 

• leave the task of creating iPhone compatible Flash components and skins to third party partners and let them deal with the legal ramifications.

 

• encourage developers to design and produce separate versions of their Flash apps for the iPhone and other platforms, but that simply defeats the whole purpose of using Flash to deliver seamlessly compliant multi-platform apps.

 

• develop its own non-infringing multi-touch gesture library for Flash to either compete with Apple on the iPhone, or just ignore the iPhone and try to establish an anti-iPhone multi-touch platform. (In this regard, it may approach Google to make all or parts of its technology available to Android.)