Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?
Robert Scoble has a good analogy: … Regarding those blue boxes that indicate embedded Flash content in MobileSafari, think of it this way: Who can make them go away? — Adobe can't. They can't put Flash Player on iPhone OS on their own.
Context & Ripple Effects
The missing-Flash experience had been visible since the early iPhone “no Flash” demonstrations in 2007. By 2008, Adobe had acknowledged that an SDK alone did not give it a route to Flash on the iPhone, a constraint captured in Adobe’s SDK reassessment.
The dispute matters because iPhone performance in the mobile market makes MobileSafari a consequential distribution gate. Adobe’s public criticism of the iPad’s Flash omission places the blue placeholders within a broader fight over who controls the browser runtime.
First-order effects
- MobileSafari users encounter placeholders where sites embed Flash, while Apple—not Adobe—holds the ability to change that browser behavior.
- Adobe cannot independently deliver Flash Player to iPhone OS, leaving its public response unable to resolve the access problem directly.
Second-order effects
- Web publishers that rely on Flash must offer non-Flash experiences to reach iPhone users, shifting implementation work from the plug-in vendor to site operators.
- Apple’s control of MobileSafari makes browser compatibility a product-policy issue for Adobe, rather than a capability Adobe can ship on its own schedule.
Third-order effects
- If mobile platforms continue to control which runtimes their browsers accept, open-web reach will increasingly depend on platform-owner approval rather than on a software vendor’s distribution alone.
The trend: Mobile browser platforms are becoming gatekeepers over the technologies web publishers and software vendors can use to reach users.