Thoughts on Flash
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple and Adobe’s dispute had already become a public platform fight: the iPad had sharpened the Flash question in February, followed by an escalating Adobe–Apple war of words in April. That conflict sits uneasily beside their earlier technical and financial ties, including Apple’s adoption of PostScript for the LaserWriter.
Apple’s statement turns the disagreement from a compatibility complaint into an explicit case for its platform choices. Adobe answered the same day with its own plan to move forward, making clear that the dispute concerned developers and software distribution, not merely the companies’ shared history.
First-order effects
- Adobe and Flash developers face a clearer signal that Apple’s mobile platform will not treat Flash as a supported path, forcing them to prioritize Apple-approved development approaches for iPad-targeted work.
- Apple gains a public rationale for setting the software technologies permitted on its devices, while Adobe loses the benefit of an assumed historical alignment with a major Apple platform.
Second-order effects
- Developers serving both Adobe’s ecosystem and Apple devices must absorb transition costs as they maintain or rebuild software around Apple’s platform requirements.
- The public break raises the stakes for platform vendors: Adobe must make its tools valuable outside Apple’s preferred path, while Apple must persuade developers that its alternative is sufficient.
Third-order effects
- If comparable disputes persist, mobile software distribution shifts toward endpoint owners that can define both the device environment and the developer rules, weakening cross-platform runtimes’ leverage.
- The episode is an early test of whether long-standing supplier relationships can withstand platform control when the platform owner’s product strategy conflicts with a partner’s technology.
The trend: Mobile platforms are moving toward endpoint sovereignty, with device makers asserting control over the software layers and runtimes that reach their users.