Why no Flash on the iPhone

This is an interesting article addressing the issue of why the iPhone does not support Adobe Flash? It is pretty common knowledge that most website use flash for anything from banners to embedded video. So the question is why doesn't the iPhone support flash if it is such a crucial part of the internet? The article goes into several reasons from the technical side about how Adobe Flash and Macs often do not agree. Flash often slows down Macs much more than the Windows counter part. When Apple first introduced the iPhone they said that the full version of Flash was too intensive for the phone and the lite version was not good enough. This sounds like a reasonable explanation, but I think that the politics of it are far more intersting.

For a long time Apple has been pushing their QuickTime format over Flash. I think that this is the more important reason. If Apple gives in and puts Flash on the iPhone it means a forfit of the battle for QuickTime. As it stands right now Apple does not appear close to doing that as the most popular website for flash use is YouTube and Apple has already conqured that battle. They have convinced YouTube to reincode their entire library in a way that would make it compatible for the iPhone's YouTube.app. They also did the same thing with Major League Baseball and their gameday.app. This speaks volumes for the political power that Apple has in the world to be able to convince companies to rework their entire programs just for the iPhone.

However, when you think about it, it does make a lot of business sense. In the couple years that the iPhone has been out it has sold over 17 million devices. There are countless articles out there discussing the move in the business world from Blackberry to iPhone and Apple's ability to get companies to buy into that says a lot about this trend. It will interesting to see where this contraversoury goes from here, but from what I can see no Flash just means that Apple has no intensions of being number 2.