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Has the App Store rendered Flash irrelevant on the iPhone?

Posted January 26, 2009 9:20 AM by Chris Seibold
Categories: Applications flash Opinions 

imageWhen the iPhone first came out all you heard was “Where the hell is Flash?” Then you’d hear about all the reasons Flash couldn’t be on the iPhone. How much Flash sucked. How much flash powered websites sucked and so on. There were good points on both sides of the debate.

The odd thing is that you don’t hear people talking about Flash on the iPhone anymore. It could be that people just got tired of wasting pixels on the topic or it could be that the App Store has satisfied most users needs. Sure the App Store doesn’t have a way for you to navigate Flash based websites but it does give you a lot of options when it comes to one of the big reasons people use Flash and that reason is games. Whether you’re a fan of word games or those tower defense games there’s a great chance you can find a app close enough to your fave Flash version somewhere in the App Store. If you can get it from the App Store and use it anytime there isn’t a real compelling reason to have Flash on the iPhone.

Of course it works out nicely for Apple as well. If you’re getting apps from the App Store instead of playing free versions online guess who gets thirty percent of each purchase?

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Comments

  1. Video is the reason people want flash on the iPhone.

    Posted by Hugh Johnson on January 26, 2009 10:29 AM

  2. I want flash to run streaming radio from certain websites. I pay for my XM and want to be able to have xm on the phone.

    Posted by William O'Connor on January 26, 2009 1:22 PM

  3. iBlueAngel has a browser in the app store with some copy and paste function. Now if they would just add flash support we wouldn’t need to use Safari.  A full web browser isn’t full if it can’t display common, widely accepted items. Even iPhoneMatters.com has a little blue Lego block on the right side of the screen. What would happen if Apple stopped supporting .jpeg’s in favor of their own QuickTime .pict’s?

    Posted by Lonnie247 on January 26, 2009 3:26 PM

  4. Flash for OS X, which the iPhone runs on, is a massive resource hog. As a result, it would drain the battery big time.

    Battery time is a big deal on any cell phone.

    Don’t expect Adobe to get around to fixing Flash for OS X any time soon.

    Posted by Al on January 26, 2009 5:09 PM

  5. Apple supports open standards.  Besides being a poor match for cell phones without dramatic improvement in years, Flash is proprietary to Adobe.  Apple won’t let Adobe put it on their phone, ever, period.  It’s time other solutions made Flash an also ran.  There are too many lazy programmers for that to happen any time soon.  I absolutely hate those intro pages that take forever to load.  I, like many others, have to click on the “skip” button to get timely access.

    Posted by REB on January 26, 2009 6:52 PM

  6. RE: REB

    That is wrong. Flash is open source. There are plenty of APPLICATIONS out there that use flash.

    Here are three examples.

    A. Yahoo Launchcast - the best site for personalized streaming music - period.

    B. Pandora. Obviously everybody knows this was converted into an iPhone app - never the less - relies on Flash for the web version.

    C. Weight Watches. A great application that was built with Flex (which is basicaly flash).

    These are just the first three I can think of. People who talk smack about flash are people that read about it 5 years ago and think that the technology hasn’t improved. Flash/Flex has come a long way and will continue to improve to allow the best RIA out there.

    Posted by Mike on January 27, 2009 9:54 AM

  7. I can’t listen to the stations *I* want to listen to…  I like the Touch a bunch but it *is* a crippled internet device.  I’m tryin’ to be patient and waiting for an update that will allow true surfing of the net.

    Posted by john on January 27, 2009 8:02 PM

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