Phones

Apple just released this letter from Steve Jobs on their stance towards Flash and Apple. 
 
A few interesting outtakes:  
On Flash on mobile devices

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?    

 On Adobe's Flash-to-iPhone layer

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.    

On open standards

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.    

Read the full letter here.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?    

Happening.
 

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.   

Except nobody's holding a gun to a developer's head forcing them to use third-party tools. Bogus city.
 

 New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.   

 Steve Jobs pushing for openness? Puh-LEEZE.

@lane: I realise flash on Android is happening (as I'm fairly sure Steve Jobs is...), the question being raised is how well it will perform. Hopefully, it'll be great, and we can all experience Flash on our Android phones. 
 
As for Steve Jobs (Apple?) pushing for openness; as mentioned in the letter, Apple did create the WebKit project, as well as being major contributors to open web standards such as HTML5. Sure, they have their closed systems which are doing extremely well for them, but it would be naive to suggest that they're in opposition of open standards.

@TheBeast: 
 
H.264 is still proprietary. It's just delivered by Steve's preferred mechanism. I'm sure if he had his givens, Quicktime would be required to watch anything on the web.

@lane: H.264 is an open standard, just patent encumbered so requires a license from MPEG LA to redistribute. I think if anything, Apple are major advocates of an open video standard.  
The Quicktime format is just a container format, nothing to do with how a video is actually encoded (they seem to push the use of H.264 for encoding Quicktime contained videos), it's used by Apple because its relatively good for storing lots of media-related metadata in a single file.

@TheBeast: 

 H.264 is an open standard, just patent encumbered so requires a license from MPEG LA to redistribute. 

Technicality. If it requires the purchase of a license, it's not a free and open standard.

I think if anything, Apple are major advocates of an open video standard.

 Just like they're advocates for open audio formats? The iPod still to this day will not play Ogg Vorbis files. And, to the best of my knowledge, the iPhone/iPad won't play Theora, either.

The Quicktime format is just a container format, nothing to do with how a video is actually encoded (they seem to push the use of H.264 for encoding Quicktime contained videos), it's used by Apple because its relatively good for storing lots of media-related metadata in a single file. 

I understand the difference. I'm just saying that if Steve Jobs had a way to convince everybody to serve videos in .mov, he'd do it. That's how his "my way or the highway" mentality works.

You know, I am absolutely not bothered about Flash on a phone (be it iPhone, Android, Win7 etc). With the type of mobile browsing I do, I cannot see Flash ever providing a benefit or being very usable on a small screen. And I cannot think of a time that I used my G1 and thought "damn, I wish it had Flash".
 
However, when it comes to devices like the iPad (where web browsing is one of the major features) then I cannot believe it isn't supported. While I don't agree with everything Steve Jobs says, I generally understand his thinking on most subjects. But regarding Flash on the iPad? He's dead wrong.
 
Is he worried about battery life? It's not a mobile phone, let the consumer worry if it's draining the battery. Stability/crashing? Again, it's not a phone so stability isn't paramount (and from what I've heard, the iPad can be pretty unstable anyway). Openness? I can't even believe he said that with a straight face.
 
The only arguement that I can reasonably accept (although I don't think it's important enough to dismiss Flash entirely) is the touch interface issue. The vast majority of flash does indeed make heavy use of mouseover/mouseout. So for a touch input Adobe would have to come up with a blanket solution, but even that I can't imagine that being too difficult (maybe light touch for mouseover, heavy press for mouseclick?).

A great response to Steve's letter.

I actually think Steve is being a bit too generous to Flash in his letter.  Not only does Flash not perform well on mobile devices, it doesn't perform well on any device.  If there is something that consistently causes my browser (any browser) to use more resources than anything else, it is Flash.   Nevermind increased battery life issue.  
 
 I also agree that HTML5 is a vastly superior standard to Flash, and will be happen to see it replace Flash.  This is just more of the same flak that Apple has got in the past for recognizing dead technology.  When they dropped the floppy drive, everyone thought they were insane, now nobody really ever uses one.   
 
Myself, I can't wait to see Flash finally die, and I'm happy to see devices like the iPad (even if I don't own one) and iPhone help harken that in, as more websites conform to the popular devices and start to move away from Flash (YT, Vimeo, etc.).  I feel if anything, Steve was coming down way too lightly on the issue.  Flash is outdated and most practical uses of Flash have better alternatives now anyway. 

@Addfwyn: 
 
Most of the time, Flash doesn't cause problems. Badly written Flash applications cause problems.
 
Also, it's not like HTML5 is some godly Messiah that has no flaws. It's just a way to natively render things that previously took third-party apps. It's not by its very nature lighter or less prone to error.

@Addfwyn: Flash supports far more features than HTML5, and while I love open standards and I am a huge open source fan, I can see why HTML5 video would be less than ideal for companies like Hulu. 
 
I do however think this whole situation is interesting, I find it kind of disappointing that it takes a hugely proprietary company like Apple to finally get people to support open standards when us open source folks have been screaming about it for ages :/. I'm also curious about the backlash from Adobe, what would happen if they decided to stop producing products for Apple platforms? Considering a huge amount of artists by Macs with the intention of using Photoshop, it could be devastating for Apple.
 
I honestly think Apple and Jobs are in the wrong on this one, but maybe, hopefully, Apple's push will get the web more open.

Man, I walked in on a thread way more "heady" than I expected. But my two cents are, as a non-iPhone user, I agree with Steve Jobs. To me, his points seem valid, arrogant, but valid.

I'm on OS X and I despise flash content because of the performance hit it takes. HTML5 doesn't give me problems like Adobe's Flash. I understand that Apple doesn't communicate with Adobe as well as Microsoft to address these issues, but it still sucks. 
 
Here's a nice plugin for you. It stops flash items from loading until you click on them. It has a whitelist for websites you don't want to block. 
Safari:  Click to Flash
Firefox:  Flashblock

@James0890: Not sure how much I agree, two of the most major video sites (Vimeo and YT) have already got quite successful HTML5 versions running.  I don't know much about Hulu since I can't use it, but I think if sites like those are capable of transitioning to HTML5, I can't imagine why it would be any different to Hulu.  They are even less resource intensive for me to run the HTML5 versions vs the Flash versions.   
 
It's also not too surprising it takes a large company to push open standards, because most people just don't care about open standards.  The average consumer doesn't care about something being a closed system or not, only the technophiles and developers actually care about that.  Without a large established company pushing for a standard like HTML5, most people would never care.

@Addfwyn:  Well I was referring to the fact that HTML5 doesn't offer any support to protect the file you're streaming, Hulu could never use it because people would simply download the episodes. I do agree that it's great for user made stuff like Youtube, but it isn't secure enough to be used commercially. 
 
And you're totally right about the general populous, I did a speech about Net Neutrality at Uni last semester and only one person in the class knew that it was even an issue. Oh well.

Regardless of how you interpret this letter; if anyone can phase out dated technology, Apple can.  
I can't wait to see Flash fade away myself - it's been going for the past 10-15 years: 

• First, we stopped using it for flash intros. Nobody liked those things.
• Then, we stopped using it for important navigation elements (This Jakob Nielsen article from 2000 sums that up well).
• No one uses it for layout/interactivity anymore. (Except for those odd few web developers that build websites for bands...)
• With the increasing adoption of CSS3 and faster JS engines, the need to use it for animation has all but gone (Example). 
• Flash's most recent raison d'être, video will (hopefully?) be replaced by HTML5 video - regardless of what encoding standard we end up using.
• Flash games have been around forever - will HTML5 be able to replace them? Frameworks like Akihabara are looking great, but probably not ready for mainstream.

 
We're not quite there with a lot of these things, HTML5 and CSS3 standards aren't finalised yet, let alone fully implemented in most browsers. But I think it takes someone as big as Apple to stand up and force these things to move ahead before we make any real progress. 
 
On Jobs' last statement; "Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future" - Adobe are pretty great at making tools. Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Flash - they're all industry standard applications. What could they do for the future of the web if they helped push for these open standards, building tools and frameworks to help developers build HTML5 video players, browser-based games (such as with Akihabara), and animations?