Roughly Drafted: ‘The iPhone Threat to Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Real, BREW, Symbian’

Daniel Eran Dilger:

In any case, the iPhone is Apple’s best shot at killing Flash, and Apple appears happy to be using it as such. The company just recently removed all remains of Flash from its corporate website, implementing everything that had been Flash-based using standards-based Ajax techniques instead.

My hunch is that beyond the technical considerations are political ones. For one thing, Apple and Adobe seem to be in a bit of a cold war. For another, is there any part of iPhone’s software that is based on source code Apple doesn’t completely control? Flash is in Adobe’s control, not Apple’s. I know Mossberg just wrote that Apple does plan to include Flash in a near-future iPhone software update, but with the release of Safari for Windows and complete control over the iPhone, I can’t help but wonder if Apple is working on a rich web app development environment of their own — something that takes advantage of technologies like Quartz and Core Animation, rather than ignoring them like Flash does — and the hook for which would be that it’s the only browser plugin environment that works on iPhone.

★ Saturday, 7 July 2007