Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh, former Adobe mobile engineers, said they were raising flags at Adobe in 2007 about the same complaints that Jobs detailed Thursday.
Walter and I, being the lead architects for Flash Lite, we were seeing the iPhone touch devices coming out, and we kept saying Hey, this is coming along, Icaza said in a phone interview. You have this white elephant that everybody ignored. Half the [Adobe] mobile business unit was carrying iPhones, and yet the management team wasnt doing anything about it.
Icaza and Luh have a vested interest in this dispute: After leaving Adobe, they launched a startup, Ansca Mobile, which produces a cross-platform solution called Corona that competes with Flash.
They said they left Adobe because executives did not take the iPhone seriously when Apple announced the touchscreen device in 2007. Instead, Adobe focused on feature phones (cellphones with lightweight web features, not smartphones) and invested in development of Flash Lite to play Flash videos on such devices. Subsequently, Adobe shut down the mobile business unit in 2007, and has suffered from a brain drain in the mobility space ever since, Icaza and Luh said.
The relationship between Apple and Adobe dates back years, as
Jobs acknowledged in his blog post. Apple in the past has relied heavily on Adobes Creative Suite to market the Mac as a platform for creative types. But the relationship has been eroding ever since Apple introduced the iPhone and opted against supporting Adobes Flash platform on the mobile device. Tensions increased when Apple released the iPad, which continues Apples steadfast
lack of Flash support.
Adobe last year announced it was developing a
work-around for Flash developers to easily port their programs into iPhone apps. But this month, just a week before Adobe was scheduled to release the feature, Apple issued a new clause in its developer policy, which stipulated that iPhone apps must be coded with
Apple-approved programming languages (not Flash).
Adobes 2007 decision to focus on Flash Lite and feature phones instead of iPhone compatibility is the reason Adobe is behind and still has not offered a fine-tuned version of Flash for any smartphone, including the iPhone or any Android device, Icaza and Luh said.
The pair echoed many of the same concerns expressed by the Apple CEO.
Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS, Luh said. It wasnt designed with that in mind at all.
Luh was also formerly employed by Apple on the Final Cut Pro team. He said that
because Adobes Flash Packager didnt use Apples toolchain to create apps, the resulting code would not work well on an iPhone or iPad. A simple Hello World app created in Flash and compiled to work on the iPhone would take up 8 MB, he said, when it should be no longer than a few KB. (Wired.com verified this figure with two other developers who have tested the iPhone Packager tool in CS5.)
Macromedia, the original maker of Flash, was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Luh said it was disappointing that Adobe failed to translate Macromedias success into a compelling mobile platform.
The biggest irony of all is that Adobe Macromedia was so far ahead of the game, it was unbelievable; it was a billion-dollar industry, Luh said. Macromedia was essential to that entire ecosystem
. The fact that through Adobe, they couldnt find a way to convert that to the rest of the world through smartphones, they really kind of just lost sight of what was really important.
, its another reason for websites to get rid of flash.
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