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Steve Jobs Says Flash Sucks

Well, actually he didn’t. When CNet initially reported on the last Apple shareholder meeting, his comments about Flash on the iPhone, buried in a list of bullet points, seemed innocent enough:

Turning back to the iPhone, don’t expect support for Adobe’s Flash technology anytime soon. The full-blown PC Flash version “performs too slow to be useful” on the iPhone, and a mobile version called Flash Lite “is not capable of being used with the Web,” Jobs said. Without an option that falls in between, it sounds like Flash is not going to be supported on the iPhone until the performance of the underlying hardware improves.

For some reason the tech press picked this up as a full-scale smackdown. Kind of strange since a more rational way of interpreting his remarks would be to conclude that the iPhone is to blame, since it is too slow to run Flash properly. I friggin’ love my iPhone but it is kind of slow, even when running plain old JavaScript. When I last wrote about this, I cited an article in iPhone Atlas (another CNet property) that backs up Jobs’s assertions on every point, including the fact that Flash Lite is used by cellphone vendors as a tool for developing slick mobile user interfaces, not as a lightweight replacement for Flash on the web. It’s probably true that someone in a secret lab in the bowels of Cupertino has a Flash prototype running on the iPhone, but that doesn’t mean that it’s ready for primetime consumption, theories of a devious corporate blood feud notwithstanding.

Here’s my theory: Jobs felt the need to explain why Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone, so he did. How boring.