Translation of Steve Jobs' statement on apple.com

Server & Hosting JustAppleIt.cz published a Czech translation of Steve Jobs' statement in which he comments on Adobe Flash and why he does not use it Apple in their products. Jobs is essentially right, if what he says in his statement is true, Adobe was not able to show them a fast and functional version of Flash for mobile devices even after several emergency calls. It goes without saying that his next claim is that Adobe developed Flash for the PC, for clicking the mouse and keyboard, but no one ever considered multi-touch. In the continuation of the article, you can read the Czech translation published on the Just serverAppleIt.cz

Translation of Steve Jobs' statement from apple.com

Relationship Apple and Adobe is long-term. In fact, we met the founders of Adobe while they were still in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first major customer, adopting their Postscript language for the new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned about 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together in the early days of DTP and those were good times. After these golden times, the companies grew separately. Apple came close to experiencing total extinction, and Adobe plunged into corporate markets with its Acrobat products. Even today, the two companies work together to serve the needs of their shared creative customers—Mac users buy about half of Adobe's Creative Suite products—but beyond that there is little common ground.

I would like to share some of our thoughts regarding Adobe Flash so that our customers and critics can better understand why we don't allow Flash on iPhoneon iPods and iPads. Adobe accuses us of making this decision purely for business reasons – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality, our decision is based on technological facts. Adobe claims that we are a closed system and that Flash is open, but in reality, the opposite is true. I will try to explain it to you.

First, there is the "Openness".

Adobe Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are available only from Adobe, and Adobe has exclusive rights to their further distribution, pricing, etc. Just because Adobe Flash products are widely available doesn't mean they are open, but rather that they are controlled solely by Adobe. By any definition you want, Flash is a closed system.

I Apple has many proprietary products, yes. Although, for example, the operating system for iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, so we strongly believe that all standards that relate in any way to the web should be open. Apple chose HTML5, CSS and rather than Flash  Javasript – i.e. open standards. Every mobile device from Applu is distributed with a high-performance, resource-efficient implementation of these open standards. HTML5, a new web standard that has been adopted Applem, by Google and many others, gives developers the ability to create sophisticated graphics, typography, animations and transitions without the need to depend on a third-party browser plugin (such as Flash). HTML5 is a completely open standard governed by a standards committee that is Apple member.

Apple they even form open standards for the web. For example, Apple started with a small open source project and created WebKit – a fully open-source HTML5 rendering engine that became the heart of the browser Safari, which is installed in all our products. WebKit has wide support and adoption. Google uses it in its Android browser, Palm uses it, Nokia also uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) announced that it will also start using it. Almost every browser on smartpfonewhich are not from Microsoftu, uses WebKit. By apple opened the WebKit technology as an open source project, essentially creating a standard for mobile browsers.

Second, "the whole web"

Adobe keeps repeating that mobile devices from Apple they can't access "the entire web" because 75% of the video on the web is in Flash. What they don't say, however, is that almost all of this video is also available in a much more modern format, H.264, and is therefore viewable on iPhonephones, iPods, and iPads. YouTube, which contains an estimated 40% of the video on the web, can be played on the app that comes with every mobile device from Apple, where the iPad offers perhaps the best YouTube experience ever. Add to that video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebooku, ABC, CBS, CNN, MCNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic and many, many, many other places on the web. Users on iPhoneiPhones, iPods and iPads won't lose as much video.

Another statement from Adobe is that on devices from Apple you can't play Flash games. That's true. Fortunately, there is App Store over 50.000 games and entertainment titles, many of which are available for free. For iPhone, iPod and iPad have more games and entertainment titles than any other mobile platform in the world.

Third, reliability, safety and performance

Symantec is warning Flash because it has one of the worst security records in 2009. And we know firsthand that Flash is the number one cause of Mac crashes. We've worked with Adobe to resolve these issues, but these issues have persisted for several years, and we really don't want to compromise the reliability, security, or performance of our iPhones, iPods, and iPads by adding Flash to them.

And on top of that, Flash doesn't perform well on mobile devices at all. For years, we've been asking Adobe to show us a Flash that would perform well on any mobile device. We've never seen one. Adobe has publicly stated that it will distribute Flash for smartphones.one early 2009, then it was the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010 and now they say it will be the second half of 2010. We think Flash for smartphonesone nooneIt will be, but we are very glad that we did not have to hold back in any way because of it. And besides, who knows how it will turn outoneWhat will it do?

Fourth, battery life.

In order to ensure long battery life for mobile devices playing video, the device needs to decode the video in hardware. Software video decoding consumes an unnecessary amount of power. In modern mobile devices, there are many chips that contain an H.264 decoder - the industry standard used, for example, in every Blu-ray DVD player. They adopted this standard as their own Apple, Goole (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Current Flash also has H.264 support, but video on almost all websites using Flash technology still uses older generation encoding that is not included in mobile chips and therefore has to be decoded in software on these devices. The difference is striking: while, for example, iPhone It plays H.264 video for 10 hours, while software-decoded videos play for less than 5 hours before the battery runs out.

Once video sites transcode their videos to H.264, they will be able to serve them without the need for Flash. Such videos will play perfectly in browsers like Safari od Apple and or Chrome from Google, without the need to install any plugin, and what's more, such videos look good on iPhonephones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, touch technology.

Flash was created for PCs that use a mouse, not for touchscreens that use fingers. E.g.; many Flash pages depend on "rollovers", which allow the appearance or change of a menu or other element on the page by moving the mouse cursor over the given position of the given element. Revolutionary multi-touch interface from Apple does not use a mouse and mouse cursor, and therefore the concept of rollover does not work on these interfaces. Most Flash pages would therefore have to be rewritten or adapted to support devices with a multi-touch interface. And if developers are going to rewrite their Flash pages for this support, why shouldn't they use modern technologies such as HTML5, CSS and  JavaScript?

Even if Flash ran on iPhoneOn iPhones, iPods and iPads, the problem of having to rewrite pages to support touch devices would still not be solved.

Sixth, the most important reason.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technological flaws, and does not support touch devices, there is an even more important reason why we do not allow Flash on iPhoneWe've discussed the downsides of using Flash for video playback and interactive web content, but Adobe is also eager for developers to start using Flash to build applications that will run on mobile devices.

We have, unfortunately, had a painful experience with allowing a third party to create a software layer between the platform and the developer. The result is thatonec inferior applications and obstacles to improving and developing the platform. When a developer becomes accustomed to only using third-party libraries and development tools, they can only benefit from improvements and extensions to the platform when the third party decides to include those platform improvements in their tools. We don't want to be at the mercy of a third party in deciding whether, and when, to make our platform improvements available to their developers.

This becomes even worse when a third party provides cross-platform development tools (note i.e. tools that allow the creation of applications that will run unchanged on multiple platforms – Mac, Win, Linux…). In such a case, the third party does not fully adopt the extension and capabilities of that platform until such time as a similar extension is available on all platforms that their tools support. Therefore, their developers only have access to a fraction of all the features provided by that platform. Again, we cannot accept a solution where developers are cut off from taking advantage of all innovations and extensions just because they are not available on competing platforms at the time.

Flash is a cross-platform development tool. And Adobe's goal is not to enable developers to write the best possible applications for iPhone, iPod and iPad. Their goal is to allow developers to write cross-platform applications – that is, applications that will run the same on multiple platforms. Adobe has been very slow to adopt cross-platform extensions since Apple. For example, although Mac OS X has been around for almost a decade, Adobe fully adopted Mac OS X only two weeks ago with CS5. Adobe was the last of the key third-party developers for Mac OS X to fully adopt it (Cocoa).

Our motivation is simple - we want to provide the most advanced and advanced platform for our developers, and we want them to stand on the ground of that platform and create the best applications the world has ever seen. We want to gradually expand the platform so that developers can develop even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins - we'll sell them more devices because we'll have the best apps, developers will get an ever-wider audience and customer base, and users will be delighted with the best and widest selection of apps better than other platforms.

záver.

Flash was created in the PC era - for the PC and the mouse. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we understand why Adobe is eager to expand Flash beyond the PC. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces, and open web standards—all areas where Flash falls behind.

A flood of media companies offering content for mobile devices Applu shows that Flash is not necessarily needed for watching videos or consuming any other web content. Moreover, 200.000 applications in App Store Applu confirms that Flash is not even needed to enable tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

On mobile devices, new, open standards developed in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will prevail (and eventuallyone(This will be the case on PC as well.) Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating quality HTML5 authoring tools in the future rather than criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Steve Jobs
April, 2010

The translation was published and translated by the Just serverAppleIt.cz!