Adobe's Flash Player Not Suited For IPhone, Apple CEO Says
SAN FRANCISCO (Dow Jones)- Adobe Systems Inc.'s (ADBE) popular media player for cellphones simply isn't good enough for Apple Inc.'s (AAPL) iPhone, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said Tuesday in the most substantive comments …
Context & Ripple Effects
Steve Jobs' dismissal of Adobe's Flash Player as 'not suited' for the iPhone lands one day before Apple's March 6 iPhone software road map event, where an SDK announcement is rumored — meaning Apple is defining what third-party software may touch the device just as it opens it up. The comment is Jobs' most substantive public statement yet on the Flash question, and CNET's pickup ('Adobe bites its tongue after iPhone Flash jab') shows the story traveled while Adobe chose silence over rebuttal.
The backdrop matters: Apple has spent late February signaling control over its stack, from Tim Cook's confirmation that iPhone carrier exclusivity is a business choice, not a constraint, to the confirmed invitation push for the road map event. Against that, Jobs framing Flash as inadequate positions Apple as quality arbiter rather than a platform adopting the de facto web runtime.
First-order effects
- Adobe's mobile distribution path to the fastest-growing smartphone is publicly closed by name: its cellphone media player cannot reach iPhone users through Apple's front door, whatever the installed base elsewhere.
- Apple hands itself veto power over third-party runtimes days before the rumored SDK unveiling, so developers attending the road map event now know native approval is the price of admission.
Second-order effects
- Adobe's counter-move shifts to every non-Apple handset maker, whose devices become the remaining showcase for mobile Flash — turning other OEMs into Adobe's distribution channel by default.
- Developers building rich media for phones face a fork: target Flash's ubiquity across feature phones or rewrite for Apple's gated stack, splitting effort and ad/tooling spend between two runtime worlds.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform owners — not standards bodies or runtime vendors — become the gatekeepers deciding which software layers reach mobile users, a structural inversion of the PC era where Adobe's players shipped everywhere unchallenged.
- Content producers who built on a single ubiquitous runtime learn that mobile reach is negotiated platform by platform, pushing the industry toward per-platform ports as the norm.
The trend: Mobile computing is moving from universally deployed cross-platform runtimes toward owner-curated app stacks, with Apple's iPhone establishing that the platform vendor arbitrates what runs on the device.