Yesterday’s back-pedaling from Apple has been very well received in the industry. Two companies who were bitten pretty hard by Apple’s policies – Google (through AdMob) and Adobe – have both responded to yesterday’s changes, and as you can expect, they’re both pretty happy.
Much of the focus has been on how the ban on third-party development tools and languages for iOS application development hurt Adobe and its Flash-to-iOS compiler in Flash Professional CS5. Adobe ceased development on this particular feature after Apple banned it, but now that Cupertino has caved under the pressure, Adobe is back in the game.
“Apple’s announcement today that it has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines has direct implications for Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool,” the company writes, “This feature was created to enable Flash developers to quickly and easily deliver applications for iOS devices. The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.”
We focussed on the third-party tools and review guidelines yesterday, but Apple also lifted the ban on third-party analytics services, which is a big boon for Google’s AdMod. Like Adobe, Google is pretty happy with this change, of course.
“This is great news for everyone in the mobile community, as we believe that a competitive environment is the best way to drive innovation and growth in mobile advertising,” said Omar Hamoui, vice president of product management at Google, “Mobile advertising has already helped to fund tens of thousands of mobile apps across many different platforms and devices, and it will help do the same for many more in the years ahead.”
So, all is right with the world.
android became a bigger threat that apple imagined. i am sure apple had thought the industry would have given up on flash and such by the time a competitor came out with something to rival the iPhone. but apple was wrong, and android is a bigger threat. now they have to do this to compete evenly. i am glad they changed their mind, even if it was only due to being pushed into it…
Now if only they would license iOS to other devices…like Google is doing with Android, but seeing as they won’t even do that with Mac OS X, I think hell will freeze over before such a decision is made.
The thing is if, this was a sign of weakness then presumeably it would be a weakness on the App front. This after all is a measure likely to increase or broaden the number of apps on the iPhone from different sources. If Apple really did feel pressured into doing this then it would logically have to be because they felt pressure in relations to the comparative app situation of iOS in relation to other platforms such as Android.
The problem is that there is not the slightest evidence that Apple is feeling competitive pressure on the App front. Apple’s App Store still has lots more Apps than its nearest competitors, developers are still making a lot (really a lot) more money on the App Store than on any other platform, the Apple App development framework continues to be updated, improved and highly appreciated by developers.
So where is the pressure on Apple on the App front?
My feeling is that this is a tidying up of the rules once Apple had a look at the various issues it was concerned about and decided it was not particularly threatened by some of stuff it had previously blocked and which had brought bad PR. Its still not supporting Flash content itself and the new rules still block development frameworks like Adobe’s AIR that try to use unsupported APIs. The Flash based development framework legalised by this rule change uses official API’s through the correct Objective C frameworks.
Apple blocked the cross platform development frameworks to prevent poor quality apps being developed and to prevent future lose of control of the development process. The new rules still block the AIR type crap which would have used unofficial APIs directly accessing the ARM architecture and thus would have significantly eroded Apple’s control of the development cycle of its own platform. Its the latter point that is the most important. As long as cross platform developers use approved APIs Apple is OK to see them go ahead.
Those rules were anti competitive., monopolistic BS, that only works to your advantage if you have a stable monopoly. They don’t. Plus the FTC came sniffing around.
This is the point, and what makes all the Apple apologists´ smoke screen look even stupider now. AIR was/is crap along with Flash, and I´m completely happy for it not to be available on iOS. It´s still not available, so the 3.3.1 change is revealed to be the utter retrograde move it was.
The fact is that Apple itself is funding development of Cocoa/iOS development models using non-3.3.1-approved-languages (MacRuby). If they´re doing it, one has to say that there must be SOME value in taking a different angle on Cocoa than the current plain vanilla Obj-C approach. MonoTouch and several other projects do not BYPASS Cocoa/Obj-C, but ENRICH IT by providing means which may be more suitable for different projects. And then the whole Lua script thing, i.e. Apple would never have equitably enforced 3.3.1 in the first place. 3.3.2 now allowing (app-contained) interpreted code (any code, you just can´t link to unofficial APIs) is a breath of fresh air.
Anyways, not to bash on Apple too much, it now looks like a more or less reasonable situation now, at least y´know, besides Apple preventing carrier unlocking and alternatives to the App Store in the first place.
Edited 2010-09-10 21:07 UTC
So how many times are you going to repeat the same post?
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?440364
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?440277
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?440103
Ah, there’s nothing like the smell of stale copypasta in the morning.
That, OR someone at Apple possesses the 2 or 3 braincells required to understand a few basic facts:
– Android-powered phones have overtaken the iPhone, and that lead is steadily increasing
– commercial developers go where the users are
– if a platform has a greater number of users, then eventually it will have a greater number of applications
Clearly someone at Apple can read the handwriting on the wall, even if you’re unable (or unwilling?) to.
Sure, if you completely ignore the 180-degree flip-flop that Apple has just done… on a policy they introduced barely 6 months ago. And the fact that it comes about a month after Android has officially left the iPhone in the dust? I guess that must just be a huge coincidence.
Except they are not.
Android App development has not kept up with Android deployment
No. Developers are interested in paying customers. The money being made by Android developers is less than 10% of the money being made by developers via the Apple App store.
So to sum up the number of Apps for Android is significantly smaller than the number for iOS.
Developers are making a lot more money from iOS.
The proportion of paid to free apps on the iOS is much higher than Android (hence the greater interest from developers.
And remember next year Apple will sell on top of its iPhone sales 25 million plus iPads (running iOS) and 25 million iPod Touches (running iOS). This game is bigger than phones.
That discussion is actually really interesting, because I think you are both right. The problem being that the “developers” word is too generic.
Developers who make software as a job (especially relatively big companies like TomTom, Gameloft, or QuickOffice) have productivity goals in mind. Their first goal is not to make interesting software, but to make profitable software. Interest is just a way to make a few more dollars. Hence they’ll tend to follow the second option.
On the other hand, developers who make software as a hobby (and some relatively small enterprises started by one or a few students around “a good idea”, experimenting to see if they can make some bucks from it) work for fun rather than for money. If they only got little to no money, but have fun while doing so and make software that is widely accepted as great by a large user base, they succeeded. Hence they’ll tend to follow the first option, and, a parameter which you both forgot, the option which costs them less (The app store *costs* a lot more money to those who make free apps).
I’m obviously biased towards the second category, but both approaches have their advantages and downsides.
* Professional people will tend to take design work more seriously, and to polish and bugfix the final software better. They have to induce more trust from the user than a hobbyist who always inspire a sympathetic feeling and don’t cost him much.
* Professional people will make less exotic, easier to use interfaces. That’s because they’ve studied usability a bit more and they acknowledge that smartphones are a glorified technology that’s in the end is just a new spawn of personal computing as a whole. Maybe a bit more targeted towards the wealthy guys, that’s why they’re here after all.
* On the other hand, hobbyists will be better at taking risks. They will make less “cold” interfaces, and won’t focus on the specific areas of the software world seen as more profitable as everything else by some market study. Because of this, it’s generally them who will introduce every single critical innovation that will be later copied and polished a bit more by professional software. They make the applications that you want to tell a friend about.
* Last, hobbyists are a bit more protected from feature bloat, because they don’t *have* to sell a new release every year in order to remain profitable and don’t feel pressure to implement something useless from the top of a complex hierarchy. I say a bit because there are still others, less incentive factors, that can take them on the way of feature bloat : peer pressure, something which “looks cool”…
In the end, everybody will choose the plaform which suits them best, I believe. To say it in the most subjective fashion that I can think of, greedy bastards from big companies will target the wealthy-but-a-bit-clueless executives and their family, forming most of the iPhone and iPad user base (it’s maybe a bit less true for the iPod Touch, but screw it the PMP market is doomed anyway), while honest guys with no market sense will choose the platform which best helps social equality and distributes their product to mankind as a whole (because their idealistic dreams of large-scale fame in a world in peace have not vanished yet).
Edited 2010-09-12 04:19 UTC
So why, exactly, do you think that people started developing for the iProducts in the first place? I’ll give you a free clue: it has nothing to do with vague, pseudo-intellectual BS about “elegance” or the “Apple experience”.
Go back in time 3 or 4 years and apply that same shortsighted reasoning: by your argument, Blackberry/WinMo/Symbian/PalmOS have nothing to fear from the iPhone, because they have an exponentially-greater number of 3rd-party developers and applications.
And you seriously believe that there’s no relationship between a platform’s userbase and the number of paying customers? Interesting.
If you replaced “iOS” with “Macintosh” and “Android” with “IBM PC”, those could be a word-for-word quotes straight from 1985.
Or maybe, just maybe, they’ve stood back, taken a look at it and gone, “Ok, we can use this to our advantage. If they want to develop using cross-platform tools we can still block the crapware but if someone does happen to come up with something worthwhile other platforms won’t be able to say “look what we have that iPhone doesn’t””
You know, I spent some time searching for a phone called Android but lo and behold I couldn’t find one. Found quite a few that run an OS called Android, in fact just about every carrier around the world who doesn’t or can’t carry iPhone is pushing these Android OS phones like there’s no tomorrow. But I certainly couldn’t find a phone called Android let alone one that’s outselling iPhone.
It is rather interesting though the number of Google ads that are popping up for Android powered phones and the carriers who are pushing them. But of course Google would never use their monopoly in one market to gain dominance in another so that must just be coincidence.
I also spent some time looking at what large commercial developers and apps are on, or coming to these Android OS phones compared with iPhone, which was itself a challenge because it seems to depend on which company’s phone you have, how many different places you want to search for apps, which version of the OS the device is running and whether that OS version can be upgraded without needing a degree in geekism, as to what the average person can, and will in the future, be able to run on that device.
So does this mean this Android OS is a bad platform? Not at all. But neither is iPhone. Neither for that matter is Windows Phone 7 (I think I got that around the right way) or WebOS. But of these the only one that has provided a SIMPLE method for developers to monetize their apps to the WHOLE customer base AND a simple method for users to access apps from ALL developers, is iOS. You mightn’t like their approach but it is very obviously working, and will continue to do so, and for very many people who want the advantages of a smartphone without having to spend half their free time managing it, iPhone will continue to be their product of choice.
IMHO if iPhone was available via multiple carriers in the US Android devices wouldn’t have sold anywhere near as well as they have, so THAT is something Apple really need to work on.
Or maybe they didn’t want to beta test 3rd party programming platforms on their IOS devices like Microsoft does with their ****.
Apple definitely isn’t perfect by a long ways. But I’d rather have a good user experience (which doesn’t meant spoiled brats get everything they want) than access to a device that does lots and lots of things, most very badly.
I am SO tired of hearing about how Apple is evil and mean to poor little Adobe Flash. Has anyone on here ever seen how absolutely horrible Flash is on the Android platform? I have a Nexus One, Froyo on it, and the Flash app installed. It might work 2% of the time, and even then I can only stand to watch something for a few seconds before I get tired of the choppiness or plain outright non-workable piece of crap it is.
Steve Jobs has been completely correct all this time in saying that Flash doesn’t work on mobile phones and has been right in his efforts to keep it off the iPhone. It just doesn’t work! Mobile phones simply do not have the processor power or memory capability necessary to make it work properly, and in my humble opinion, don’t need to have it if there is a perfectly acceptable alternative that works just fine right now, namely HTML5. Why is everyone on here so totally against HTML5? In the tradition of OSNews, I suspect an evil plot/scheme at work to keep HTML5 off of mobile phones. Maybe it’s Adobe that is the evil one here.
That last one might be normal. On all demos of Flash on Froyo that I’ve seen yet, it takes some seconds before flash video becomes smooth.
About the “it works 2% of time”, well, I’ve seen both users saying this and the absolute contrary, so I’m not sure who I should believe
For a first release of full flash on mobile devices, and hence something mostly targeting early adopters, it sure seems to work pretty well already, and looks encouraging given the amount of releases it took Macromedia and Adobe to make something looking like this on the Linux flash release. They seem to finally understand that Flash bugfixing and polishing on non-Windows platforms needs a huge speedup. And that benefits everyone
OTOH, I fear that there is some KDE 4.0 effect going on, and that everybody is going to include it while it’s not quite ready. When I see someone scrolling a page with flash on Froyo, I find it just laughable. Google should give Adobe some time to make their code more polished before pushing it in every single Android handset
(PS : Btw, Apple primarily banned Flash from iOS in order to avoid painful competition with the App Store, and not for technical reasons. The part of iOS SDK license that forbids applications from downloading interpretable code shows this pretty well.)
Edited 2010-09-11 10:30 UTC
Why do you continue to defend Adobe and Flash?
This is closed technology.
This proprietary technology
This is bad technology.
If you want to see how bad – have a look here
http://rixstep.com/2/1/20100417,00.shtml
Why keep arguing that Flash is great on phones when it isn’t?
It makes no sense.
Is it just because you couldn’t bear to say the dread words “Steve Jobs was right”?
I always thought that after banning Flash on the iPhone Apple was hoping that the other platforms would rush in with a premature “we have Flash” adoption and thus significantly deoptimise their devices.
And that’s what Google did.
I bet they are chuckling in Cupertino.
There’s dumb, and then there is dumber.
Because as much as I dislike most of Adobe’s software, including Flash, from a technical point of view (and from an UI point of view too when I consider their content creation software), there’s more to an interpreter than its technical performance. What people code using it matter, too.
There are wondrous things made in flash, especially in the gaming area. Kongregate and ArmorGames are full of examples. Other websites include very nice physics games made in flash, too, though they can be less polished. Flash is a tool for creative peoples, and creative peoples tend to make cool and original games.
If it was only for youtube and Vimeo, I would worry if I was adobe. Video playback has just become too common to be left to a proprietary plug-in, it must become a part of the browser in the end. Which raises a whole lot of other issues, like the H.264 one (who is still an issue as of today because one silly company doesn’t want to support anything but it in its browser).
But as far as gaming is concerned, my bet is that even 10 years away from now, there will only be few javascript games having nearly the quality of the best flash games from now.
Because flash can be used without a degree in computer science. (Which is exactly why swf code is generally unoptimized and cpu-hogging, by the way)
Because flash was designed with multimedia and graphics in mind right away, while Javascript still struggles to get the most basic of vector and bitmap rendering standard across multiple browsers.
Because flash was there first.
Flash is crap. But it’s the best crap available right now.
Edited 2010-09-11 17:34 UTC
So devs can use the Adobe software to make their Flash apps worth with iOS.
When will we see real Flash support?
When Adobe releases a version that runs on phones and iOS devices that doesn’t run like crap.
The ball is very much in Adobe’s court.
They need to actually release a version of mobile Flash that really works without killing the phone, draining the battery or turning video in a slide show.
Bookmarked. I’ll hold you to this. I’m assuming that once that version of Flash does arrive (and it will, look how good Flash 10.1 performs on Windows), I’m assuming you’ll be among the first to advocate Flash on the iPhone, considering your words above?
The question is this – why would Apple block Flash if not to protect the end user from crappy software?
If that’s not Apple’s reason fro blocking Flash then what is their real reason?
What’s in it for Apple?
I hope that the Flash ban on the iOS kills Flash – its crap on the desktop as well. What do we miss without flash – lots of ads that kill my browser?
I run Safari with Click to Flash and I can tell you a rarely click
It’s been said a million times, and it doesn’t take a college educated nerd to find that out: Flash is competition with the App Store. Plain and simple. Right now, games have to be made native. With Flash, people can make awesome applications and circumvent Apple’s control. This is pretty basic stuff.
You did not answer my question, though.
Use a real operating system, like Windows. Flash on the neglected Mac OS X is a piece of crap because, well, Mac OS X is not as advanced as Windows in the areas where it matters for Flash (i.e., stuff like the graphics stack). Flash 10.1 on Windows – while still inherently incompatible with the open web, like H264 – is tolerable. Playing 480p YouTube video, I’m getting ~10% CPU; 720p jumps to ~14%.
I still use FlashBlock, though, because I only want Flash when I explicitly grant permission.
Edited 2010-09-11 14:26 UTC
As someone who uses OS X I would have expected you to know that Flash in 10.6 uses CoreAnimation for shapes. The graphics stack in OS X is just fine (and with a lot less baggage than Windows), Adobe is the problem. Getting them to do anything about their terrible software requires beating them senseless with a clue-stick.
Oh, of course. It runs fine on Windows after how many releases–and we all know that phones run Windows, don’t we?–so that just proves so very much about Flash’s performance on phones. News flash: The Linux version still sucks. The OS X version still sucks. The Android version is a battery guzzler. So far, I don’t see Adobe doing much to fix the situation on non-Windows platforms. One would have thought their first Android version would have been a bit more impressive if they wanted to make a splash in the mobile device arena.
Hopefully never. I don’t agree with Apple’s motives, but the more that can be done to discourage use of that abomination called Adobe Flash, the better. Flash is the cancer of the web, and it needs to be removed if we ever hope to have something remotely resembling an open web in the future.
“This is great news for everyone in the mobile community, as we believe that a competitive environment is the best way to drive innovation and growth in mobile advertising,”
Yes that’s what everyone need… more advertisement.