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Open Letter to Steve Jobs -- Apple Flash Back

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raldo:

--- Quote from: JimH on April 30, 2010, 02:32:31 pm ---Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

--- End quote ---

I'd say this is the real reason why Apple doesn't want flash. Flash is a competitor to Apple's Apps which generate a lot of revenue for Apple. So, in a sense, it's understandable.

jherbert:
Best comment on this I have seen so far.

Stonehedge:
May I also make a quote? This is from Steve Jobs open letter.

"I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues."

I agree on that Apple want to protect their App Store but Steve is denying this.

glynor:
I don't know... I thought The Steve had some very good points.  Since you supposedly want a discussion about it, Jim.  I'll respond a bit.


--- Quote from: JimH on April 30, 2010, 02:32:31 pm ---Adobe isn't "open".  Adobe is "proprietary".

Apple is the Queen of Proprietary.

--- End quote ---

First off, he didn't say "Adobe is proprietary", he said "Flash is proprietary" and that is absolutely true, and there is a difference.  Adobe makes plenty of "closed" software (Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, for example), but Steve wasn't complaining about any of those packages.  He was drawing a distinction between building closed software and devices (Adobe Photoshop, JRiver MC15, the iPhone, and Apple MacOSX, to name a few) and having a closed standard used as the primary video and animation delivery vehicle on the web.  I think this is an important and not irrelevant distinction.  If Flash is left to exist as the de-facto standard on the web for video, there is nothing to stop Adobe from demanding per-stream licensing fees at some point in the future.  There is nothing to stop them from breaking existing content (without anyone having any say) with a new version of the Flash player, and there is no opportunity for other people to build competing "players" which might have better security or performance.

Regarding the hypocrisy... Apple does certainly make a lot of extremely proprietary and locked-down products, you'll get no argument from me there.  However, they do also support and create a LOT of open standards.  Some that I can think of off the top of my head that were basically purely or mostly Apple created: MP4 (based on, and effectively a replica of, the Quicktime MOV container), WebKit (written by Apple and released as open source), and RTSP and HTTP Streaming.  Many other standards also had a LOT of support and assistance from Apple: OpenCL, IEEE1394, and HTML5 to name just a few recent ones.  They draw a firm line between what they view as their "products" (software and hardware), which are locked-down to high heaven, and their "internet technologies" which are often open and freely available for even competitors to use.  For example: you can write your own RTSP streaming server competing with the Quicktime Streaming Server if you want (and some companies, like Wowza, have done just that).  Steve admitted as much in his letter.  He clearly stated: "Apple has many proprietary products too."  You may believe that they often are far too closed with their software and hardware lockdowns (and I'd agree with you wholeheartedly) but the "Queen of Proprietary" title you award them is far from a clear win.  I'd say there are others out there (Intel, for example) who are at least equally deserving.


--- Quote from: JimH on April 30, 2010, 02:32:31 pm ---Flash isn't a standard.  H264 is a better choice.

--- End quote ---

I think you misunderstood his point on this topic.  He wasn't comparing "Flash" to "H264".  That wouldn't make sense because they are two different things, like saying "Shoes are better than cheeseburgers."  One is a video compression standard and one is a web-focused extension framework, which can be used to serve video, but is not a video format in any way (not anymore, anyway).  He was simply explaining that most video on the web is already available using the open H264 standard, including the Flash video.  This is simply a fact, and Adobe agrees!  Adobe abandoned their old proprietary FLV video format with Flash 9 (soon after they purchased the tech from Macromedia) in favor of using H264 compression and the MP4 container.  Very little current video on the web is still in FLV format anymore, even though most of it is "served" by a Flash player widget.  For example, on my non-profit's web site, we serve all of our video using FlowPlayer, which is a Flash player (one of these days I want to switch to JWPlayer, but that's another story).  However, all of the video files actually served by the embedded Flash player are H264 MP4 files, just as Adobe recommends.  Steve's point, and it is a good one, is that using a Flash player made sense when you couldn't embed these video files directly in a page (because no browser would know how to play them, or give you a controller bar, or control over how and when and in what way the video would play).  Flash solved all of these problems and was quite ubiquitous.  However, now that there IS an open standard for playing video (HTML5) and most of the browsers can just use that, there is no longer any benefit for the web developer to using a Flash player.  Why NOT use an open standard instead, since your existing video assets are already ready-to-go as-is?

However, the situation isn't as simple as he pretends in his diatribe.  There are still some substantial stumbling blocks that he left out.  For example, while Microsoft has now committed to fully implementing it in IE9 when it arrives, they did NOT implement the VIDEO embed tag in HTML5 in their currently-shipping (and still #1 market share) web browser.  Making the situation worse, both Mozilla and Opera have refused to support H264 video compression in their HTML5 implementations because while it is an open IEEE standard, some of the underlying compression technologies are patent encumbered.  They chose to implement Theora compressed video in an OGM container (why they didn't choose MKV is beyond me, but anyway).  Theora is okay, but is no where near the quality of MPEG-4 ASP (H264), roughly equivalent in quality to older DivX/XviD encodes.  This fight has led to a bit of a fragmented HTML5 video support environment, with Apple, Adobe, Google, and almost certainly eventually Microsoft supporting the H264/MP4 standard and Mozilla, Opera, and Google supporting the Theora/OGM standard.  Luckily the Video embed tag in HTML5 does have a means to deal with this semi-gracefully, but it does force people like me who create the video for the web, to generate a pile of duplicate files in different formats for every single video we publish.  I understand why Mozilla and Opera feel the way they do, but Theora just isn't good enough.  They need to either adopt H264 or allow third-parties to build plug-in renderers for their browsers so that H264 video works using the video embed tag.


--- Quote from: JimH on April 30, 2010, 02:32:31 pm ---"Flash is the number one reason Macs crash."

Oh brother.

Steve.  Macs crash?   Really?  I don't know that.  I use a Windows PC.  It doesn't crash.  I've never seen Flash crash Windows.

--- End quote ---

I have to agree with you here, somewhat.  The Flash implementation on Windows is pretty good as far as crashes go, though it is awful on both OSX and all of the flavors of Linux and UNIX.  But, that is actually part of Steve's point... The problem is that no one except Adobe can fix it, and if they aren't motivated to spend valuable resources building well-optimized versions of the Flash plugin for Apple's operating system (and keep in mind, fully 50% of their money-making software Suite is sold to Mac users), how likely do you think it is that they will spend time fixing the performance of their Solaris build?  Or the Debian Linux version?  Or the Red-Hat version?  The issue is that there is no opportunity for competition to improve the problems.  There's no way for a third-party company to come in and fix it, you just have to wait and hope that Adobe eventually will do it (and it will certainly be on their timeframe).  There is no opportunity for competition to drive Adobe to fix it, which becomes something of a lock-in to the Windows platform.  If we allow Flash to stay a "web standard", and Adobe decides to stop making a version of the Flash player for Linux or OSX or Solaris or BSD, then that will make those platforms unable to access the full web experience.  His point is that the web is different from software.  That it was designed to be a level playing field, and that allowing one company with one proprietary standard to control it themselves unilaterally, is harmful to consumer choice and society as a whole.  He is saying that it is a different thing than locking down an operating system or an iPod, because, if you don't like what Apple does with their hardware and software, you can choose not to buy a Mac or an iPod and choose a Windows or Linux computer instead (or a Sansa or a Zune).  Apple isn't doing anything to lock you out of the Web with their proprietary ways.

Again, I think he paints a bit rosy of a scenario.  The App Store and their mobile devices are completely locked down, and I'm not a fan of that policy at all.  Apple views the App Store as a store, similar to iTunes or Amazon MP3 Store, and not a "communications medium".  I think the line is a bit blurry here, though there is certainly still lots of consumer choice.  If you don't like the policies, you can always buy an Android device or WebOS phone if you prefer, and you can still get on the web and still get software for your device.

His other point in this section, which you skipped over, Jim is probably even more relevant.  Where is this legendary Mobile Flash that Apple is supposed to approve?  It doesn't exist.  It is completely and utterly vaporware, not just for Apple's hardware, but for all of the current ARM-based mobile platforms (sorry, the stripped down thing they call "Flash" on Windows Mobile doesn't count, all code has to be custom written for it and it has nothing even approaching a full feature set).  Adobe has been promising this for years now.  Where is it?  Where is this proof that current generation ARM hardware can actually run full Flash content with acceptable performance?  Maybe if Adobe was actually shipping a product for Apple's competitors (and launch dates hadn't slipped for over two years) so that Google and Palm/HP could proudly pronounce "we have full Flash support, na-na-na-na", then Apple's song would be a bit different.  But so far, it has been vaporware.  All promise and no delivery.

You also skipped over one of his 6 major points entirely, which was security.  And on this, I completely agree.  Adobe has a dismal security track record, especially in their Acrobat and Flash technologies.  Literally two weeks don't go by before some website (often top-tier sites like MSNBC or The New York Times) ends up serving their users a malicious Flash SWF that exploits a security hole in the Flash plugin to install malware.

Even high-tech sites aren't immune.  It happened just a few weeks ago at Anandtech, of all places.  Mashable and the Drudge Report got hit a few weeks before that, and so on and so forth.  Macromedia never designed Flash with modern security concepts in mind, just like Microsoft didn't design Windows 95 with fundamental security concerns in mind, and so it is fundamentally broken.  It needs to be re-written from the ground up, and Adobe has shown NO inkling of a plan to do so.  In fact, just a few months ago, they announced that they weren't even going to release security patches for critical flaws except on a quarterly basis!  They backed down a month or two later, but the fact that they even had this laughable plan shows a callous disregard for computer security and a fundamental misunderstanding of the responsibility that comes with that 98.9% installed base with a web-connected technology.

glynor:

--- Quote from: JimH on April 30, 2010, 02:32:31 pm ---Battery Life
I guess that would be more of a problem for my phone wouldn't accept a spare battery.  Oh, wait, Apple doesn't believe a user can change a battery.  I forgot they're embedded in the device.  Dead battery.  Return phone to Apple.   Bad Flash.

--- End quote ---

You can carry a pile of extra batteries with your phone if you want, I suppose.  For me, I'd rather have longer battery life and no removable battery than a removable battery with lots shorter life.  And, yes, in every fair test, ALL of the competing phones with removable batteries do worse than those with none.  Could be a long-running fluke, but I doubt it.  The battery concern is quite serious.  Power use nearly DOUBLES on modern laptops with GPU acceleration when Flash kicks in.  Cutting your battery life in half is no joking matter.

That said, I think the Steve was pretty disingenuous here.  He explains that the reason Flash video, in particular, consumes so much more power on mobile devices is that handset manufacturers build components into the hardware which accelerate video decoding (indeed, it is part of the ARM architecture, and it is also part of all of the different GPU components of the major ARM-based platforms out there, including the Apple A4).  According to Steve, Flash does all of it's decode functions in software and makes no use of the GPU assistance and special code paths in the ARM architecture that are available.  We'll have to take his word for it, I suppose, since Adobe isn't actually shipping a version of Flash for any of these platforms, but even assuming it is true... A lot of this is because of restrictions in the API.  It is not entirely clear that Adobe could use the accelerated code paths in an iPhone OS version of Flash, if Apple would let them build Flash for the iPhone at all.  It is possible (other apps in the App store do accelerate video decode, like AirVideo), but the licensing language is murky, and Apple could use it as an excuse to reject the app.

We will see if Adobe ever releases a full-featured Flash player plugin for Android, Windows Phone 7, or WebOS, if they actually do bother to make a different version for each and every set of hardware.  I personally doubt it.  The problem is that the hardware market is so fractured.  Adobe would end up having to write different plugins for each different actual device (an "Android" plugin that uses hardware acceleration designed for the Motorola Droid, would not necessarily work on the Nexus one, and CERTAINLY wouldn't work on the HTC G1).  They would almost certainly optimize their iPhone version, if Apple would let them, but how do you think you would fare if you had a less-popular hardware design?  How about 18 months after your device was released and a new version of Flash comes out?  Think they'd ever bother to back-port it or would you be on the hook for a new phone?


--- Quote from: JimH on April 30, 2010, 02:32:31 pm ---Touch

Flash doesn't work well with Apple's touch screens.  Bad Flash.  Bad Apple.  Figure it out, Steve.  You've got Adobe's attention now.  Personally, I don't like touching the screen when the movie rolls.  I'd use the escape button, but wait, AppleGear doesn't use buttons, does it.  How about a multi-purpose home button that emulates escape if you click three times short, three times long, then three times short again?

--- End quote ---

I have no idea what you mean by this comment.  But the truth is, for Flash Applications (not video players, but for all of those Flash games and site designs, just like the one you guys have up on your page), any application that detects and uses a mouse rollover effect (like JRiver's page does) does not work on a Touchscreen device.  That's just the way it is, and it was a very good point.  So, assuming that Adobe does eventually come out with a full-featured Flash plugin for Android, and assuming HP or Asus or someone does make a nice Android tablet, and I buy one (which is a good likelihood), then I STILL won't be able to fully experience and use lots of Flash content, including the Flash content on JRiver's web site.

This is, of course, not Adobe's fault at all.  However, the vast majority of Flash site navigational controls out there DO make heavy use of the mouse rollover design paradigm, and they are all either useless or very difficult to use with a touchscreen device (even a Windows 7 touchscreen device, as I've experienced myself).


--- Quote from: JimH on April 30, 2010, 02:32:31 pm ---Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.

Steve.  It's a computer.  Developers like to write apps for computers.  Flash has a lot of developers.

But I can see your point about Apple being "open" and Adobe being "proprietary".  Sort of.  From your point of view, I guess.  Not really.

--- End quote ---

I agree with you completely on this point.  The closed App Store model is a monster and is dangerous to the future of software development.  I'd say it is even MORE dangerous than the x86 monopoly ever was.

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