Thoughts on DaringFireball’s latest post on Apple and Flash. Lets Call a Spade a Spade can we?

Quotes from the post and counter arguments:

Apple isn’t trying to replace Flash with its own proprietary thing. They’re replacing it with H.264 and HTML5. This is good for everyone but Adobe.

h264 is NOT part of the open web. Its proprietary technology that Apple (and Adobe) happen to license and Apple has adopted that its core media technology. Frankly, there are enough posts out there that indicate Apple may actually want to sabotage the ogg-theora effort, you know, the real open source video codec?

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Publishers use Flash for web video because Flash is installed on such a high percentage of clients; clients support Flash because so many publishers use Flash for web video. Apple, with the iPhone, is solving the chicken and egg problem.

It is actually only a problem if you are Apple. End users didnt seem to mind enough to not install or update the players.

[The whole story of the kid not able to play a web game and then…] That there was a period of initial frustration due to Flash games not playing doesn’t change the fact that they (a) bought an iPhone and (b) were set to buy games from the App Store.

They probably were, but a couple maybe. But the kid was not going to get a game every time he got bored of the last one. The story worked out for Apple sure, but not the kid really. Apple didnt start him off in a new direction where he was going to be a lot happier with better games available.

The iPhone’s lack of Flash has not hurt it one bit.

Yeah, neither did having AT&T as a carrier but we all know our sentiment on that.

I’ll leave the last word to Apple COO Tim Cook, who a year ago said, “We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make…

Exactly. Its a battle for ownership of platform. Can people stop saying “Apple is doing this for us”?

P.S
My main coding machine is a Mac and I really like it. I think the IPhone is a fantastic device and the user experience let Apple push its own agenda around video further. Its a deserved win! But for Apple’s proprietary platform.

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur