Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash

This is Steve Jobs's article published on the Apple website in April 29, 2010. Like the "thinking about music" that shot DRM three years ago, this is also an article about Flash technology under Adobe, which has been rival Apple for many years. In recent months, Flash vs. HTML5 has been widely discussed in the industry. This article does not bring new perspectives and opinions, but the identity of Steve Jobs undoubtedly makes it important for other companies. -- Editor

The relationship between Apple and Adobe has been around for a long time. We knew the founder of Adobe when he was still working in the legendary garage. Apple was their first major customer and changed their Postscript Language to our new Laserwriter printer. For many years, Apple has been one of Adobe's shareholders and owns 20% of its shares. The two companies have joined hands to create the desktop computer publishing industry, with many happy times. But when we passed the golden age, we were separated. After Apple's death, Adobe entered the enterprise market with its Acrobat product. Today, the two companies are still working together to serve customers in the Creative industry-about half of the customers of Adobe's Creative Suite software are Apple computers. However, we have almost no other common interests.

I want to write down some of my thoughts on Adobe Flash here. I hope our customers and critics can better understand Why Flash is not allowed to run on iPhone, iPod, and iPad. In Adobe, the main driving force behind our decision is business considerations. They said we wanted to protect our App Store. But in fact, the main problem here is the technical problem. Adobe says that Apple is a closed system and Flash is open, but they just say the opposite. Let me explain it.

First, let's talk about "Openness 」.

Adobe Flash is 100% proprietary software. You can only get Flash from Adobe, and the future improvement and pricing of Flash will be totally influenced by Adobe. Although Flash and related products are widely used, this does not mean that they are open because they are completely under the control of Adobe and you can only obtain them from Adobe. No matter how it is defined, Flash is a closed system.

Apple also has many proprietary products. Although iPhone, iPod, and iPad operating systems are private, we fully believe that all standards related to the World Wide Web should be open. We chose HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript instead of Flash. They are all open standards. All Apple's mobile devices are inherently well supported by these open standards: fast operation and low power consumption. HTML5 is a new standard on the World Wide Web and is adopted by Apple, Google, and many other companies. Web developers can use HTML5 to make advanced images, fonts, animations, and transition effects without relying on third-party plug-ins (such as Flash ). HTML5 is fully open and controlled by a Standards Committee. Apple is a member of the Committee.

Apple even created some open standards for the World Wide Web. For example, we developed WebKit from a small open-source project. WebKit is a fully open-source HTML5 page translation engine. It is used by the Safari kernel in all our products. WebKit is also widely used by other companies. Google uses it in its Android browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) recently announced it will switch to it. In addition to Microsoft, almost all browsers on smartphones use WebKit. Apple has set standards for mobile Web browsers by enabling its own WebKit technology.

Second, let's talk about the "complete Internet 」.

Adobe repeatedly said that Apple's mobile devices cannot access the "full Internet" because Flash is used for 75% of videos on the Internet. They did not mention that almost all of these videos are stored on the Internet in a more modern format-H.264-and can be viewed on iPhone, iPod, and iPad. YouTube shares about 40% of online videos. It exists as a software on all Apple mobile devices. Among them, the search and Video watching experience provided by YouTube on the iPad may be regarded as the title of each family. In addition, there are also Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NBC, Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and sports pictorial., "people", "National Geographic" (USA ), and many more. Few online videos are invisible to iPhone, iPod, and iPad users.

Adobe also claims that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is not false. Fortunately, there are more than 50 thousand games and entertainment software in the App Store, many of which are free of charge. The number of gaming and entertainment software on iPhone, iPod, and iPad is also at the top of many platforms in the world.

Third, let's talk about reliability, security, and performance.

Symantec recently pointed out that Flash was one of the least secure systems in 2009. We have first-hand evidence that Flash is the culprit in Apple's computer crash. We have been working with Adobe to solve these problems, but after a few years, the results are not very good. If Flash is added to the iPhone, iPod, and iPad, their reliability and security may decline, which we do not want to see.

In addition, Flash performance on mobile devices also has problems. In the past few years, we have often asked Adobe to use a mobile device-any mobile device-to demonstrate Flash performance. We hope to see good performance, but we have not yet done so. Adobe once said that Flash will appear on smartphones in early 2009, and then postponed to the second half of 2009, and then changed to the first half of 2010. Now it is said that Flash will appear in the second half of 2010. We believe it will appear sooner or later, but we are glad we haven't waited all the way. Who knows what it will do when it comes to performance?

Fourth, talk about battery endurance.

To maintain a good battery endurance during video playback, mobile devices must use hardware to decode the video. Software Decoding is too costly. Many mobile devices today contain sdks named H.264. H.264 is an industry standard and is used by every Blu-Ray DVD player. Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix, and many other companies are also useful.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, almost all Flash websites currently use the old-generation decoder: chips on mobile devices do not support them, so they can only be decoded through software. The difference is huge. For example, H.264 videos can be played continuously for up to ten hours on the iPhone. However, if the video decoded by software is played for less than five hours, the battery will be used up.

Fifth, let's talk about touch screens.

Flash is designed for PCs and mice and is not suitable for touch screens and fingers. For example, many Flash websites use "hover over the cursor": when a user moves the cursor to a certain point, a menu or other elements are displayed. Apple's revolutionary multi-touch interface does not require a mouse, nor does it have the concept of hovering the cursor. To support touch-screen devices, most Flash websites must be rewritten. If developers want to rewrite Flash websites, why not use modern technologies such as HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript?

Even if the iPhone, iPod, and iPad support Flash, it still cannot solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch screen devices.

The sixth is the most important issue.

Flash is closed, private, and has major technical problems. Touch Screen technology is not supported. In addition, there is a more important reason for us to decide not to let it run on the iPhone, iPod, or iPad. We talked about the disadvantages of using Flash to play videos and display interactive content on websites. However, Adobe also hopes that developers can use Flash to compile software running on our mobile devices.

The past painful experiences show us that adding a third-party software layer between the platform and developers will eventually lead to a large number of low-level software, it also plays a negative role in the progress and development of the entire platform. If developers start to rely on third-party libraries and tools, they will be subject to this third party: developers can use them only when the third party accepts the new features introduced by the entire platform. When the improvement of our own platform can be delivered to developers, it cannot be determined by a third party.

When this third party provides a cross-platform development tool, the situation will become worse. Functions on a platform may not be immediately adopted by a third party, but may not be supported until these improvements are available on all platforms supported by them. Therefore, developers only have the most basic functions available. Similarly, Apple cannot accept the result that developers do not have access to our innovations and functional improvements because these innovations and improvements do not exist on our competitor's platforms.

Flash is a cross-platform development tool. Adobe's goal is not to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod, and iPad software, but to help developers write cross-platform software. In the past, Adobe was too slow to improve its adoption of Apple's platform. For example, Mac OS x has been launched for ten years, but Adobe did not fully convert Mac OS X (Cocoa) until CS5 was released two weeks ago ). Among all the important third-party developers, Adobe is the last to fully support Mac OS X.

Our motivation is simple: to provide developers with the most advanced and innovative platforms, we hope they can directly stand on this platform to create unprecedented high-quality software. We hope to continuously improve this platform so that developers can write better, more powerful, more fun, and more useful applications. Everyone is the winner-Apple will sell more devices with the best software, and developers will have more and more users. In the face of the best and the widest selection of software platforms, users will also be happy.

Conclusion.

Flash is a product of the PC era. It was invented for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we also understand why they want to extend it beyond the personal computer field. However, in the mobile age, low energy consumption, touch interfaces, and open world wide web standards are important. None of these are Flash's strengths.

Various media are scrambling to provide content for Apple's mobile devices. This shows that Flash is no longer indispensable for watching videos or consuming any type of webpage content. The more than 0.2 million software in Apple's App Store proves that for tens of thousands of developers, writing programs with rich visual effects-including games-does not have to use Flash.

New standards in the HTML5 and other mobile age will win on mobile devices (as well as personal computers. Perhaps, instead of criticizing apple for making great strides, Adobe should focus more on creating quality HTML5 tools for the future.

Steve Jobs
April 2010