No more talking Flash trash: the program that Steve Jobs so seems to revile appears to be good-to-go for apps, or programs, on the iPhone and Apple's other mobile devices, including the iPod Touch and iPad.
The announcement from Apple doesn't means that those annoying messages mobile users see time after time when they click on many websites, videos and animations, saying essentially, "Sorry, can't show you this because you need Adobe's Flash Player," will go away. It means that apps made specifically for Apple's mobile devices — and downloaded from the App Store — can use Flash.
While Flash wasn't named by Apple specifically on Thursday, it did say that it is "relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need."
Some of those developers are game developers, and with Apple's newly launched Game Center, Flash is all the more important. Games are one of the biggest "app," or program, categories for iPod Touch and iPhone users. And perhaps more importantly, Apple's has launched its own software for mobile advertisers on its iOS mobile device operating system, and and those advertisers want to be able to use Flash.
And, there's the Federal Trade Commission. No, they don't want to use Flash on an iPhone app. But they have been interested in the effect of Apple's Flash ban in terms of how it could squelch competition.
Jobs has been outspoken in his loathing for Flash, saying he believes it has too many bugs, drains device batteries too quickly and is better-suited to computers than mobile devices. He prefers the competing HTML 5, which is newer but not as widely used so far.
Some had hoped when the iPad came out last April it would be able to run Flash. But at that time, Jobs issued a 1,600-word treatise about what he considered Flash's issues — "reliability, security and performance."
Most importantly, he wrote, Flash puts a third party between Apple and software developers. Besides, he said, "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of Web content ... And the 200,000 apps on Apple's App Store proves that Flash isn't necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games."
At that time, John Warnock, a founder of Adobe told The New York Times: “To ignore a major component of the Internet like Flash seems a little silly."
That was then, almost six months ago — virtual eons in the tech world. In the months since, Google's Android-based operating system has shot up in popularity on phones— in the United States, Android-based smart phones were the top sellers among consumers in the second quarter, according to NPD. Android will also soon will be a mainstay for many tablet products that will compete with the iPad.
Android may continue to win the bigger Flash war: Android devices using the latest 2.2 version of the operating system will have Adobe Flash, not just for apps, but for Web viewing.
From msnbc.com
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