Ok, Apple, what’s up with your new developers terms?
People are up in arms over the new developers terms that effectively are going to shut Adobe Flash developers out of the iPhone.
There are accusations flying and terms that aren’t making a lot of sense regarding how Apple operates, and let’s just cut to them.
Apple designs a complete ecosystem, hardware and software. No one complains about the closed ecosystems for gaming platforms such as the Wii, Xbox or PS3. And they are unarguably very successful.
The real question you might ask yourself is who is Apple’s customer for mobile devices. Is it Adobe? Microsoft? Google?
It’s the end user, and quiet honestly, the end user has pretty simple needs. How often have I heard a person riddicule the iPhone or smartphones saying, all I want to do is make a phone call! Simplicity!
Apple got it with the simple apps that come with the phone.
Flash support means that Apple will have to support another technology on it’s phone and ensure it is stable and doesn’t interfere with the product. According to Apple, it drains battery life significantly faster.
But what about…
What about what? Apple makes both the hardware and software. They don’t license it to anyone. For 1 full year the idea of an App was foreign unless you jailbroke your phone. One page of Apps was it. People still bought the phone. No one complained that it didn’t have Java Apps or lots of other stuff.
Why? Because there was no expectation.
Oh yes, I’m a fan of Apple. But I also offer criticism when that’s due too.
Personally I believe that the flash/CS5 deal has more to do with Adobe’s lack of OS X support for 64 bit with Photoshop, which may have moved Mac Sales to Windows PCs.
Who bit whose hand first? Huh?
Of course you can’t write terms of service that say, if you use flash, it won’t be supported, now can ya, so they made it generic.
I think that the people who have more room to criticize are Independent Musicians who use iTMS to sell their music.
But atleast music has gone DRM free.
If you don’t like the Apple mobile experience, there are plenty of other well established competitors, Blackberry, Android, Palm, Windows7 mobile. Just to name a few, not to mention all those feature phones out there.
Criticism is good, but let’s not call it a monopoly.