Google evil, and Adobe lazy?

// February 2nd, 2010 // flash

At a recent in-house Q/A at Apple, Steve Jobs called out Google and Adobe when questioned about Google’s competitor to the iPhone, Nexus One, and iPad’s apparent lack of Flash support. He basically went on to say that Google does not hold true to their motto – “Don’t be evil.” He articulately described Google as “full of crap” and said that Abode was “lazy.”

Steve, tell me what’s more evil? Essentially marketing a pre-existing product with a larger screen as “magical” .. or offering true value with each iteration of a product or design (pretty much all of Google’s products). Not to mention that Android OS is fully open-source while the iPhone OS is the farthest thing from it. Yet you have the nerve to bash Flash for being a closed/proprietary format even though most of it is open source.

Anyways, here’s some proof that Adobe is certainly not lazy… In spite of literally zero support from Apple, the Flash Platform Team has been hard at work trying to get Flash applications running on the iPhone (and iPad, by extension) and doing a pretty good job of it. The way they do it is to translate Flash AS3 to Objective-C (iPhone’s native programming language) so that any Flash app can be compiled for and run natively on the iPhone OS. It’s actually quite ingenious, if obviously unnecessary. With little support from Apple, this would have been available much sooner.

Check out the video posted on The Flash Blog – http://theflashblog.com/?p=1737

I would definitely like to see more apps like this on the iPhone and iPad. The only problem is that most users will have to download these applications from the AppStore as this workaround does not allow Flash content in the browser to run the same way. Hence, Apple still retains full-control over which applications make it onto the AppStore, and still profits from all paid applications built with Flash.

Who’s really proving to be evil in all of this?

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