Apple Mobile Shenanigans

If you are a "mac" then you more than likely know about the apple insider web site.  They often know what is a'buzz in the world of mac innovation.

Right now the Apple iPhone 4 Flash Development shut-out is a hot topic.  Apple basically told Adobe that they won't let the Flash plugin on the Apple Mobile OS platform a while ago, so Adobe created a way to convert Flash code (ActionScript) into native iPhone applications. Apple has now decided "Eh, ...that won't be allowed either." Jerks!  This is the equivalent of picking a fight, and I am waiting to see how Adobe responds.

Adobe along with a number of other non-Apple-owned companies have invested in playing-by-the-rules to create development tools that allow developers to create an application once and port that application to a number of Operating Systems:  Windows, Mac OSX, Windows Phone 7, Google Android Mobile OS, and Apple's Mobile OS. But Apple is basically saying, "Nope! If you want to write an application for an Apple mobile device, then you have to write code exclusively for Apple."  They are basically trying to keep people from writing an application once and making it available on competing devices.

Now, This is a funny anti-competitive approach. Rather than simply trying to own a market, they are trying to make it impossible (or at least highly disincentivized) to produce apps for Apple and easily make those apps available on other competing platforms. If you produce an app for Apple, then you have to start from scratch to recreate that application to run somewhere else. I think the word that best personifies this is "evil."

I digress.  If you are simply a consumer then, in the short run, if Apple has what you want then you will simply buy an Apple mobile device. If you are a developer, then you will likely build applications wherever it is easiest to sell the most apps.  Right now, for developers, that means you would either build (1) for apple and only apple, or (2) for everything or anything else since the cross-platform development tools will let you build apps for everything other than Apple. My money is on the idea that in the short run, people will buy Apple. In the long run, I see developers developing for Android+Windows Mobile+Windows Desktop + Mac Desktop + Linux Desktop using cross-platform rather than Mac Mobile only! Apple will eventually just drive it's mobile devices back to the kind of marketshare that their computers have generally stalled at. And people will then say the same thing about the state of their mobile devices compared to the alternatives, "Well, I would buy a mac (mobile) device, but there isn't enough of the software I am looking for." (Again, right now Apple is doing well, but give it a year or two.)

As a final note, on Apple Insider the brilliant people over there wrote the following justification for why Apple is restricting development tools:

Apple's move apparently comes in a defense strike against Flash app shovelware, which threatens to water down the original content in the App Store with lots of existing, poor quality Flash games originally designed for the web or other mobile platforms and rebaked to work on the iPhone.

Now, I would buy that if Apple had no way of controlling the applications that sell in the iTunes App Store.  But we know better.  They test the applications and the apps that tests well enough make it through to the App Store.  And there are currently Flash converted apps in the App Store which means that the Apple iTunes App Store is no more threatened by poor quality Flash games than it is by poorly written XCode apps.