Establishing The Motive:
Last time I wrote about the first part of the dispute, which culminated with Apple creating new TOS (effective in a few days). These new terms will most likely result in the removal of my 2 existing itunes apps, and a third which has been “in delayed review” for 4 weeks now without explanation. These three apps and a fourth being finalized at the time of the announcement were all written in Flash.
A woman tries to jailbreak her iPhone
The next logical step is to look at the actual on-device performance of my apps to see whether or not Apple’s claims of third party apps producing inherently inferior design are justified.
First of all the claims that Flash is not acceptably fluid on mobile devices simply aren’t true. After repeated tests on everything from Samsung BlackJack II (using Flash Lite) to iPhone and Android’s Nexus One, a glaring reality is that the iPhone simply doesn’t perform as well with Flash as other pieces of hardware. Saying that this means the Flash program is poorly written is like saying that Firefox is a poorly written application just because of how horribly it runs on Macs (imo). iPhone folks will not want to hear it, but the Droid devices are simply far better in terms of performance.
Despite this disparity, Apple’s sales dictate focusing on their market, and getting improved performance was simply a matter of tweaking a few things for the platform. This was the same as any other kind of coding – there’s a learning curve because Flash has never run on these devices.
So how does my sommelier app, built entirely in Flash, run on the iPod Touch and iPhone? Very well. Well enough that my marketing person and I decided not to tell our testers who were downloading it via provisional codes that it was built in Flash. If there was any issue we wanted to hear about it naturally. Their only noticeable difference? They wondered why the file size for the download was a little higher than what they were used to. No complaints about animation quality, image quality, speed or functionality. This, despite the fact that my sommelier app accesses a series of arguments that allow for over 10,000 possible food pairings. We all know that iPhone users are picky about app operation, and changes were always made to optimize performance.
It’s not as if locked technology is a new thing for Apple. Their entire business model is based on locked hardware. When I wanted to start building and upgrading my own computers I stopped using Macs 7 years ago. Here however, the actions of Apple seem to be vindictive, as indicated by the announcement’s potential financial effect on Adobe:
Adobe went so far as to say in today’s Q-10 filing with the SEC that being banned from the iPhone and/or iPad could significantly hurt its business.
“To the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed,” Adobe said in its filing.
Is it supposed to be a coincidence that the TOS were announced 4 days before Adobe’s CS5 announcement? A coincidence that they wouldn’t even allow Adobe a chance to work with them on optimizing the software packager for the device?
Most troubling, in a storefront infested with $.99 garbage apps – which most users discard after downloading – there’s no frame of reference for Apple’s supposed quality control. Similar to their removal of “sexually suggestive” apps, Apple continues to display nothing short of the sort of tyrannical behavior their fanboys have been excusing for years. This is what happens when a single entity acts as judge, jury, and in my case, executioner for creative products. Aren’t many of the same people making excuses for them the ones that went ballistic over Microsoft’s DRM moves of the past several years?
Next, Pt. 3: “Selling all of my Apple Products and Moving on” or …
Alright You Cunts
