Steve Jobs posted a letter recently which gave his take on why Apple isn’t supporting Adobe Flash on the iPhone and iPad. The Apple CEO declared Flash a proprietary format that was unreliable and unsuited to portable devices.
In response, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch posted a response that, without going tit-for-tat, summed up his company’s position. This morning Apple posted some thoughts about Flash on their web site. The primary issue at hand is that Apple is choosing to block Adobe’s widely used runtimes as well as a variety of technologies from other providers, wrote Lynch. Clearly, a lot of people are passionate about both Apple and Adobe and our technologies. We feel confident that were Apple and Adobe to work together as we are with a number of other partners, we could provide a terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. However, as we posted last week, given the legal terms Apple has imposed on developers, we have already decided to shift our focus away from Apple devices for both Flash Player and AIR. We are working to bring Flash Player and AIR to all the other major participants in the mobile ecosystem, including Google, RIM, Palm (soon to be HP), Microsoft, Nokia and others.
We look forward to delivering Flash Player 10.1 for Android smartphones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June. From that point on, an ever increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice, he concluded.
Source: Adobe.com
