The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash
There has been some ... interesting news from the tech sector this week. — Firstly, the Apple vs. Adobe vendetta gets even nastier, with a public letter from Steve Jobs explaining why Adobe's Flash multimedia format will not ever be allowed …
Context & Ripple Effects
The letter lands after months of friction that had already gone semi-public: Jobs dismissed Flash at his Wall Street Journal iPad demo in February, and commentators spent early 2010 debating whether Adobe should retire the format on its own terms rather than wait for platforms to drop it. The same week, discussion of HTML5 as a replacement for Flash in mobile apps was already circulating among investors.
What changes with 'Thoughts on Flash' is that an informal exclusion becomes declared policy: Jobs states outright that Flash will never be permitted on Apple's platforms, framing the rejection as a choice of open standards over what he argues is not the Web. An open reply to Jobs appeared the same day, marking the moment the disagreement turned into a named public feud rather than a private platform decision.
First-order effects
- Adobe's mobile Flash strategy loses its largest prospective smartphone and tablet audience overnight, since Jobs' letter commits Apple to permanent exclusion rather than case-by-case app review decisions.
Second-order effects
- Developers targeting iPhone OS must rebuild Flash-dependent content in HTML5 or native apps, shifting tooling and ad-serving spend toward formats Apple endorses, while Android's openness becomes Adobe's main counter-argument to market.
Third-order effects
- If other platform owners follow Apple's lead, control over which web technologies ship on devices moves from standards bodies and plugin vendors to handset makers — making the format wars a distribution-power question rather than a technical one.
The trend: Platform owners are asserting veto power over third-party runtimes on mobile devices, with Apple's Flash ban as the defining test of whether open web standards displace proprietary plugins.