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Comment by olivercameron | Hacker News Reader

This argument has been played to death, and Adobe never seem to let it go. The fact is, Apple owes Adobe nothing, and not including Flash was never a dig at Adobe as a company, but a choice that Apple made about Flash as a software package. Adobe seem to have taken it super personally, but the truth is that Flash on mobile devices just doesn't work in it's current form (speed and usability issues). Steve has said multiple times that the door isn't closed on Flash, they just need Adobe to prove it will perform like Apple expects.

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Not exactly. Apple changed their developer agreement such that programs that weren't developed using the iOS SDK weren't allowed on the App Store. They reversed the decision only later on, and now you can develop on Adobe AIR and have the LLVM-derived compiler (irony?) output code for iOS.

With all of Flash's security issues, I am not surprised Apple doesn't let native Flash apps on their own store.

I think the security issues for flash in-browser (mobile safari) are more troublesome than security issues for apps in the app store.

Apple can (in theory) validate that the things going through the app store aren't total malware. In-browser? You're on your own, for good or for bad.

Truly. We should disable JavaScript as well. Who knows what AJAX vulnerabilities might be in mobile Safari? Apple can't vet them all for malware. On that token, Apple can't vet all websites to make sure that their content doesn't misrepresent Apple as a company. They should probably just trash Mobile Safari altogether.

But at least Apple can fix bugs when it finds them in its own products, whereas if there's a giant Flash security hole it can do nothing to fix it.

The security model for AJAX is open, well-documented, and peer-reviewed. Safari implements the same-origin policy, various CSRF-mitigation standards, and tends to be updated quickly once exploits are found.

I didn't say that Apple should or shouldn't do anything. Just that apps from the App Store are potentially safer than things in-browser. Of course JavaScript apps pose similar risks, but as Apple controls the JS engine (unlike the Flash runtime) they feel safer that way.

You seem to be talking about … different things, no?

> "Adobe seem to have taken it super personally"

They took it very seriously, as well they should. It was clear that mobile, even then, was going to become so big as to start directing change on the desktop. If Flash is left out of mobile, Adobe's relevance is seriously threatened.

That said, I think the 'personal' nature of their response is just posturing. They're taking a victim stance to stir up sympathy because, well, they can. The press will respond to that story far more readily than a straight technological disagreement. And boy have they. It's confusing the issue long enough for Adobe to adapt their authoring tools to kick out competent HTML5, which will protect their revenue stream in either case.

Agreed. Also don't forget that no one really made much noise about the lack of Flash on iPhones. It wasn't until iPads also had no Flash that Adobe could more clearly see the writing on the wall and started making a lot of noise.

What's more, Adobe would never have put this much effort into making Flash suck less on mobile platforms if Apple had decided that shitty Flash was better than no Flash and went ahead and shipped it with iOS.

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