Control freak, or reverse psychology?

[kickaha]

One of the things that has had the tech blogosphere up in arms is the exclusion of certain technologies from the iPhone, specifically Java and Flash. There are those who insist that THEY MATTER, and that any device without them is Doomed(tm). (I seem to recall the same argument about pocket music players without WMA support, but whatevva.) There are those who think that they'd be nice, but not necessary. And there are those who are glad they're not being offered, and hope it remains that way. All three camps, of course, think the other two are insane.

There are some good political reasons for not having Java and Flash on an Apple device:
1) Java isn't really used anywhere else in the Mac ecosystem. It's *there*, but as someone who runs Java apps daily, let's just say that the rest of the Java development world tends to forget that Java is supposed to run on more than just Windows. (And let's not get into the puketacular UIs that come out of that realm.)
2) The iPhone has Cocoa. What need is there for Java, from the user's perspective?
3) Flash is proprietary. One of the biggest up and coming uses for Flash is to embed video in a webpage. I'm fairly certain that Apple might have some problems with that, given their huge push for ISO standards such as H.264 and MPEG-4.

With the advent of the iPhone SDK, it turns out that there's no technical reason why Java and/or Flash couldn't be ported to the iPhone. (I mean technical reasons why it *couldn't* be ported, not technical reasons why it *might not be a good idea*, such as battery life.) Sun announced last week that they plan to create a JVM for the iPhone, and today Adobe announced intent to create a Flash Lite installer.

However, if you look in the SDK EULA, you find out that one of the classes of applications specifically included is anything that runs its own executables, including plugins. Boom: no JVM or Flash allowed.

This has Sun and Adobe *pissed*. They are fighting mad, fighting tooth and nail to get their technologies on the iPhone, and goddamit, they are *NOT* going to let Jobs be right that they suck battery life, are slow, and are exactly the poor user experience he said they'd be.

In other words... if Apple succeeds in keeping Java and Flash off the iPhone, they really only hurt Sun and Adobe.

If Apple fails, and Sun and Adobe bring highly optimized ports to the iPhone... gee, Apple didn't have to put a dime into porting them, did it? Wow, that kind of failure really sucks.

Compare and contrast this with Java on MacOS X, where Apple finally got tired of the lousy JVM performance from Sun, and took it in-house, or Flash, which is one of the buggiest plugins for Mac browsers, is consistently a generation behind the Windows counterpart, and about 3x as slow.

Nicely played.

Comments

[badger.livejournal.com]

(This tangent is off your "There are those who insist that THEY MATTER, and that any device without them is Doomed" remark.)

Around 2000 I was arguing with a web developer who liked Flash and wanted to design only websites for his firm's clients that required Flash. I argued not everyone has Flash, he replied surveys at the time showed 85+% market penetration. I asked how many companies would be happy about blocking roughly 10-15% of the online customer base at the entrance. He didn't have a coherent answer for that. Didn't change his behavior, either. Sigh.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

*nod* It's exactly the same justification for using IE-only web design... well golly, [some number < 100% and falling] has it...

The only way to have a *prayer* of maximizing your customer base is to use technologies that anyone can use and verify against, free of charge. Like, oh, standards. Not de facto "because everyone else is doing it" standards, but real honest to god open, documented, published standards.

IE8 has thrown in the towel on IE-centric design, and now the webmasters who drank the Kool-Aid are *pissed*. (Tough noogies, we all warned you...)

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Oh, come on. IE8 has that big "emulate the proprietary past" button, put there *just for* the Kool-Aid addicts. What do they have to complain about?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

But that's too haaaaaaaaaaard....

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

Control freak. "You don't do it the way we would if we were going to, so no."

:p

[badger.livejournal.com]

"My house, my rules. If you don't like it, go take over the market with a different product and then you can set your own terms." :)

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

That still says 'control freak.' ;)

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

So when are you guys putting Unreal Engine 3 on sourceforge?

;)

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

That's not up to me! :p

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Control freaks. ;)

[franktheavenger.livejournal.com]

Nah, that was passing the buck. ;D

[ashears.livejournal.com]

Favorite observation of the day: puketacular UIs

Thank you for that.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

You are quite welcome. It comes from years of wanting to claw my eyes out.