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Flash

Goona

Goona

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Mar 11, 2009
2,268
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I always hear the main reason Apple won't allow flash on the iphone is because it will take away revenue from their app store. By all accounts Apple isn't making that much money from the app store, heck even itunes, music, and movies don't make them that much money. Their majority of income comes from selling hardware. Anything that can make the iphone more attractive they will add, flash will eventually come when they feel it is ready for the phone and not what others are doing. What do you think?
 
Goona said:
I always hear the main reason Apple won't allow flash on the iphone is because it will take away revenue from their app store. By all accounts Apple isn't making that much money from the app store, heck even itunes, music, and movies don't make them that much money. Their majority of income comes from selling hardware. Anything that can make the iphone more attractive they will add, flash will eventually come when they feel it is ready for the phone and not what others are doing. What do you think?
Click to expand...

Flash is becoming less important as web standards evolve. Apple sees no reason to establish a mobile platform for adobe. I don't think we'll ever see flash.
 
I'm not sure where you heard that it was because of revenue, but I was always under the impression that Apple claimed that under the current conditions it would drain too much battery life and wasn't worth having because of how quickly you lost the battery life. Maybe I'm wrong?

But I highly doubt that it would be based on revenue, heck, Apple supported and promoted web apps before they had the App Store (which obviously isn't the same scenario as right now, but still), so I doubt that they would care that much over how much revenue could be lost.

And on top of that I think that Apple is bringing in a hefty profit from the App Store, 30% of each application sold goes straight to Apple. Even if that only means making $0.30 off of a $1 app, that is still a pretty big profit considering how many copies of that app are sold.
 
Goona said:
I always hear the main reason Apple won't allow flash on the iphone is because it will take away revenue from their app store. By all accounts Apple isn't making that much money from the app store, heck even itunes, music, and movies don't make them that much money. Their majority of income comes from selling hardware. Anything that can make the iphone more attractive they will add, flash will eventually come when they feel it is ready for the phone and not what others are doing. What do you think?
Click to expand...

What I don't get is how this would take away revenue from the App Store? Would it be because of the Web Apps that would be available with a Flash-Enabled web browser? If that is the reason Apple won't add it, that just sounds like a greedy move on their part. But, I believe the main reason Apple won't add it to the iPhone or iPod touch is because it doesn't really run too well on a mobile device yet. If you've seen some of the flash demos shown on phones such as the HTC Hero that have flash support, the web browser crashed quite a few times and isn't very stable. And of course knowing Apple, they won't stand for half decent performance on their mobile products. You can kind of see that with video recording on the 3G S, they definitely wanted better hardware in order to support video recording that met their ideal standards.
 
cmaier said:
Flash is becoming less important as web standards evolve. Apple sees no reason to establish a mobile platform for adobe. I don't think we'll ever see flash.
Click to expand...

I disagree. Perhaps Flash is reverting to more of a specialty presentation, those applications are important and will continue to be. One thing that's important now but will eventually change is Flash video. Many sites continue to stream video in a Flash player, while others use h264 players which the iPhone will pick up.
 
JML42691 said:
I'm not sure where you heard that it was because of revenue, but I was always under the impression that Apple claimed that under the current conditions it would drain too much battery life and wasn't worth having because of how quickly you lost the battery life. Maybe I'm wrong?

But I highly doubt that it would be based on revenue, heck, Apple supported and promoted web apps before they had the App Store (which obviously isn't the same scenario as right now, but still), so I doubt that they would care that much over how much revenue could be lost.

And on top of that I think that Apple is bringing in a hefty profit from the App Store, 30% of each application sold goes straight to Apple. Even if that only means making $0.30 off of a $1 app, that is still a pretty big profit considering how many copies of that app are sold.
Click to expand...

I read it on some of the internet blogs when the issue of flash first came up. About the profits I don't think it's that much considering the costs Apple has running the app store. It's not like all that 30 cents is pure profit.
 
Slip Jigs said:
I disagree. Perhaps Flash is reverting to more of a specialty presentation, those applications are important and will continue to be. One thing that's important now but will eventually change is Flash video. Many sites continue to stream video in a Flash player, while others use h264 players which the iPhone will pick up.
Click to expand...

Exactly there are so many flash based web sites, it's not even funny and you can't get full access to them without flash. Most video on the net is also flash so we can't access streaming video or video that isn't youtube videos. Some sites are also using silverlight from Microsoft, maybe that may need to be added in the future.
 
Flash is the biggest pile of crap the internet has ever seen. Why does a flash video take 80% of my CPU just to watch it? Watching the same streaming video with either QuickTime or Windows Media is around 10-20%. Not to mention all the CRAP flash ads. And since there's no ad blocker for the iPhone/iPod Touch, you get to watch all of those crappy ads, right on your iPhone. I will take HTML5 video any day of the week.
 
Slip Jigs said:
I disagree. Perhaps Flash is reverting to more of a specialty presentation, those applications are important and will continue to be. One thing that's important now but will eventually change is Flash video. Many sites continue to stream video in a Flash player, while others use h264 players which the iPhone will pick up.
Click to expand...

LOL. "will continue to be." You're funny. If I had a list of all the things that people said would "continue to be" important in the computer industry over the last 20 years, it would be a hella long list. Recent favorites include PalmOS, .NET, and GaAs.
 
Also think about the crappy implementation of flash in safari on macs. It keeps crashing safari. Put that on the iPhone and you can be assured that people will whine about the crappy hardware that keeps crashing. But it's not the hardware it's the pos program called flash killing the product. But people are stupid they want what they want regardless of if it works well. CFS
 
Goona said:
Exactly there are so many flash based web sites, it's not even funny and you can't get full access to them without flash. Most video on the net is also flash so we can't access streaming video or video that isn't youtube videos. Some sites are also using silverlight from Microsoft, maybe that may need to be added in the future.
Click to expand...

The point is, how long do you thing web site operators will continue to use proprietary plugins when HTML 5 and its progeny add equivalent functionality and a larger and larger percentage of potential customers are on non-flash enabled devices? Flash is a stopgap measure on the tail end of its usefulness. Apple isn't going to support it.
 
Goona said:
I read it on some of the internet blogs when the issue of flash first came up. About the profits I don't think it's that much considering the costs Apple has running the app store. It's not like all that 30 cents is pure profit.
Click to expand...

FYI, Apple turned $570 million PROFIT in 2007 with $1.9 billion in revenue from iTunes according to Billboard.

That was in 2007 when app store was immature, so imagine how much Apple is making this year with booming app store on top of still increasing iTunes.
 
cmaier said:
The point is, how long do you thing web site operators will continue to use proprietary plugins when HTML 5 and its progeny add equivalent functionality and a larger and larger percentage of potential customers are on non-flash enabled devices? Flash is a stopgap measure on the tail end of its usefulness. Apple isn't going to support it.
Click to expand...

agreed. Flash will eventually become irrelevant. I'm not worried about it not being on the iphone anymore.
 
Goona said:
I always hear the main reason Apple won't allow flash on the iphone is because it will take away revenue from their app store.
Click to expand...

It's not about money. It's about control.

Let's look at the Mac. Remember the switch from OS9 to OSX? Remember the switch to Intel? Do you remember the primary reason people gave for not switching when those changes happened?

"I'll upgrade once Photoshop/Word/Whatever updates to support it."

Apple came out with great new OS versions and great new hardware, and then they had to sit and wait for Adobe and Microsoft to update their software before most people would buy Apple's cool new toys. Those other companies had no incentive to hurry up just to help Apple sell new computers sooner.

With the iPhone Apple doesn't have that problem. The 3GS came out last week and every developer knew they'd darned well better be ready or they'd get left behind. So what did we see? Record sales the instant the phone was available and massive 3.0 OS downloads.

Imagine a world, though, where people use 60% App-store apps and 40% online Flash-apps on their iPhone. Let's say the 3GS comes out in that world and Adobe says "we'll upgrade flash to support OS 3.0 in October." What do you think that would do to 3GS sales in that imaginary world? Once again, Apple would be waiting for Adobe before they could sell their new phones in large numbers.

Why would Apple put themselves in that position? They have very little to gain by supporting flash (popular sites now know that they must make an iPhone version, so people aren't missing much) and a LOT to lose!
 
I agree, but I still think Flash has some great uses online. Adobe is working hard on a lighter version, coming to other mobile platforms... I guess this will be a chance for Apple to gauge.
 
The simple reason they don't have Flash on the iPhone is because it would absolutely *destroy* battery life. For a simple test, run your laptop on battery power while browsing the web, take a note of the time remaining on the battery. Now go to YouTube and start watching a video, now take another note of the time remaining....

Also, to say Apple isn't making much money from the AppStore, or iTunes in general, is a bit naive don't you think? They are absolutely raking it in.
 
coolwater said:
FYI, Apple turned $570 million PROFIT in 2007 with $1.9 billion in revenue from iTunes according to Billboard.

That was in 2007 when app store was immature, so imagine how much Apple is making this year with booming app store on top of still increasing iTunes.
Click to expand...

The App store isn't making much money, most of the apps are free apps, I guess Apple is making billions from users downloading free apps.
 
Source? App store seems like a very profitable biz for apple. They make $$ from SDK and percentage of app sales...

Goona said:
I always hear the main reason Apple won't allow flash on the iphone is because it will take away revenue from their app store. By all accounts Apple isn't making that much money from the app store, heck even itunes, music, and movies don't make them that much money.
Click to expand...
 
Goona said:
The App store isn't making much money, most of the apps are free apps, I guess Apple is making billions from users downloading free apps.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry, but could you please provide a source other than your own speculation, because all other sources indicate that Apple is pulling in huge figures on App Store sales for small prices of apps. Here is an article (link) that takes several different approaches to calculating and speculating how much Apple is making from the App Store. The average estimate in this article (which was written in May '09, so still fairly accurate) is that Apple had made about $100 million from App Store sales in the history of the App Store. Now whether you consider $100 million a lot for a company that is worth billions is your view, but I do, figuring the App Store has only been open for about 12 months.

So I highly doubt that Apple would see any dent in App Store revenue if flash were implemented on the phone or iPod, since the Apps run natively and are MUCH more easier to use.
 
coolwater said:
FYI, Apple turned $570 million PROFIT in 2007 with $1.9 billion in revenue from iTunes according to Billboard.

That was in 2007 when app store was immature, so imagine how much Apple is making this year with booming app store on top of still increasing iTunes.
Click to expand...

The App Store didn't even exist until 2008. :D
 
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