In a lengthy blog post discussing the lack of Flash support on Apple’s portable devices, particularly the iPad, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch made several comments supporting the argument for Flash on Apple’s devices while giving examples of content iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users will be unable to access without Flash support. “Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device,” Lynch writes.
“Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over 85% of the top web sites containing Flash content and Flash running on over 98% of computers on the Web… It is used for the majority of casual games, video, and animation on the Web and familiar brands like Nike, Hulu, BBC, Major League Baseball, and more rely on Flash to deliver the most compelling experiences to over a billion people.”
Discussing Flash on mobile devices, he continues, saying, “[t]he Flash engineering team has taken this on with a major overhaul of the mainstream Flash Player for a variety of devices. We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers.
This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs.” Finally, Lynch claims that Adobe is “ready to enable Flash in the browser on [Apple’s] devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.” The post has drawn a large number of comments from readers, many of which are critical of Flash and Adobe as a company. Lynch’s post follows comments reportedly made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at a corporate town hall event last week, at which Jobs is said to have called Adobe lazy, claiming that Flash is buggy, and adding that no one will be using it going forward as online development shifts to HTML5.
