The bickering between Apple and Adobe over why Apple’s iPhone and its new iPad don’t run Adobe’s Flash software is giving me a headache.
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Apple CEO Steve Jobs says Flash is buggy and accuses Adobe of being lazy. Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief technology officer, denies that and accuses Apple of trying to control what iPhone and iPad users can do with their devices.
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Jobs says Flash is on its way out. No way, says Lynch. Enough already. You guys are beginning to remind me of my kids. Can’t you find some way to get along?
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It seems to me that Apple and Adobe need each other. Even if they didn’t, the millions of us who own iPhones and iPod touches or who plan to buy an iPad when the new multimedia tablet hits the market need them to work things out. Because we’re the ones who are going to lose out if they don’t.
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Adobe’s Flash is a software program that plugs into a Web browser to deliver multimedia content such as games, videos and interactive advertisements. Adobe says the vast majority of top Web sites include Flash content and that 75 percent of the video on the Web is delivered using Flash.
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Flash has mostly been a PC experience, because Flash players either haven’t been available on smartphones or weren’t powerful enough to access much of the Flash content on the Web.
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Until now, the lack of Flash on the iPhone hasn’t been that big of a deal. When the iPhone debuted in 2007, the browsing experience was so much better than what came before it on mobile phones that it was hard to complain that it didn’t support Flash. It was great just to be able to access the Web and full HTML pages. And because other smartphones also lacked…