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Apple Source: Adobe’s Flash Is “Too Buggy” For the iPad

By Leander Kahney (4:45 pm, Jan 29 2010)

The iPad will notr support Adobe's Flash, which is widely used across the web for rich media. During Steve Jobs' introduction of the device, he loaded the New York Times homepage, which had a big blank spot where it's Flash movies are located.

The New York Times' homepage during Steve Jobs' demo of the iPad on Wednesday -- note the missing Flash video.

UPDATE: Adobe says Flash is not buggy and that Apple is protecting revenue streams from content like movies and games.

Flash will not be coming to the iPad — not now, not ever — says a source inside Apple who is part of the iPad development team.

Instead, Apple will rely on HTML 5 and CSS to play rich media, such as YouTube videos, on the web.

“Flash is too buggy and will crash the whole device,” says the Apple source. “Apple’s done no deal with Adobe.”

Adobe is already hopping mad about the omission of Flash on Apple’s latest device. In a blog post Friday, the company showed how porn sites would look on the iPad without Flash — more or less empty of content.

Adobe has already protested the lack of Flash on the iPhone. On Friday, the company’s Flash Platform blog pledged to find ways for Flash apps to run on the iPad. The absence of Flash on the iPad was obvious during Wednesday’s debut of the device. Showing it in action, Steve Jobs surfed to the New York Times website, which had a missing Flash plug-in displayed prominently on its front door. Jobs did not mention Flash during his presentation, nor has the company provided official word on why it’s missing from the iPhone and iPad.

The issue of Flash is important because so much of the web’s rich media is encoded in Adobe’s format. Critics point out that the iPad won’t be able to play most movies on the Web – a glaring omission for such a media-centric device.

Apple is betting that HTML 5 will fill the gap.

HTML 5 is an emerging standard for rich media that promises to do away with plugins. It moves away from single vendor technologies like Flash, Silverlight and Java FX. HTML 5 is already built into Safari, Firefox and Chrome.

But although YouTube and Vimeo are already using HTML 5 for their mobile video sites, it isn’t yet widely deployed. Some experts predict HTML 5 won’t be popular for at least three years, unless the iPad breaks records, of course.

Apple would likely use HTML 5 on the iPad in conjunction with CSS (which would reformat mobile sites to fit the iPad’s 4:3 aspect ratio, rather than the iPhone’s 16:9).

Neither Apple nor Adobe responded to requests for comment.

Appel didn’t respond to a request for comment.

32 comments »

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About the author

Leander Kahney

is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac, and author of three books about technology culture: Inside Steve’s Brain, the New York Times bestseller about Steve Jobs; Cult of Mac; and Cult of iPod. Leander has written for Wired, MacWeek, Scientific American, and The Guardian in London. Follow Leander on Twitter @lkahney and Facebook.

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Posted in Apple, Apple Tablet, iPad, News |

  • Geek

    Gee, I use a MacBook Air and the wife an I-Book, we never had a problem with Flash.

    Too buggy for Apple, sorry not the truth. Apple has separated its mobile devices Phone, Touch, Pod and now Pad into a content controlled cage that it controls. Flash opens the cage door a crack and that could cost apple download and down the road money.

    I will not be buying the I-Pad but not because of the lack of Flash or the A4 ARM platform. The I-Pad is like a Zebra a horse designed by committee

  • http://www.ipadlot.com Fretboard

    I can’t imagine Flash not being figured out for iPhone or iPad, eventually.

    http://www.ipadlot.com

  • http://ObamaPacman.com ObamaPacman

    Flash is too buggy even for desktop OS X. That’s why YouTube is switching to provide option for HTML5 videos instead of flash.

    Lol iPod doesn’t do flash. iPhone doesn’t do flash, and somehow Apple is successful with them.

  • Batguano

    Looks like Apple demonstrated that it’s indeed possible to live in a world without Flash. About time, too. Adobe got too complacent. The world moves on.

  • Kurt

    “Flash is too buggy and will crash the whole device,” is NOT the reason. Selling apps in the app store is the reason. Apple has the right to any business model they wish, but it is a bummer to be missing flash on their portable devices. We develop flash/flex/air apps for enterprise and would love to have Apple devices as delivery choices. Other devices get the job done but none are as desirable as Apple’s.

  • Marky Mark

    This will cause problems, not for Apple, but for the poor people who will buy these things in their thousands. The general public have no knowledge and no interest in Apple’s spat with Adobe – probably never even heard of ‘Adobe’ or ‘Flash’. All they know is that – significantly – AFTER they’ve parted with their money – that a whole bunch of content doesn’t work with something that’s been touted as the ultimate web-browsing device. Instead it’s been replaced by blank blocks in web pages that have a crappy lego brick in them instead of a news report or music video or interview.

    I’m a geek – I know what I’m getting (or not) – however a very large number of people are just going to feel ripped off instead.

    I don’t understand why Apple is doing this when Macs with Safari run Flash without issue. The only thing I can think of is that there is some fundamental weakness in the iPhone/iPad OS that can’t cope with Flash and would take a ground-up rewrite to resolve. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced Apple has made a truely monumental f-up somewhere and they’ve just decided the easiest way to deal with is is from the opposite end of the issue.

  • Marky Mark

    I just want to add – no flash on the iPhone is a minor inconvenience becuase it’s a device of convenience. The iPad is offering a different experience for different circumstances – an apparently credible alternative to a laptop or desktop for browsing web content. In that case, lack of flash support is 100% a dealbreaker for me. If I can’t even watch embedded video on a site such as BBC News, what’s the use? It’s not remotely credible as an alternative. Rubbish.

  • http://blogs.adobe.com/jd John Dowdell

    Hi Leander, could you identify your secret source, so we can assure its integrity?

    (I know you can’t, but I had to ask… it’s one thing if it’s an engineer, another if it’s Phil Schiller etc… would give at least a little context on how to reply. I wouldn’t be surprised if an Adobe PR rep could not give you a “reactive paragraph” to an unsourced and unconfirmable quote like that!)

    Or, put another way, if Apple truly believed this, then could they get it on the record so we all can talk together, instead of trying to manipulate the media like this? That “controlled leak” strategy doesn’t really seem viable anymore.

    jd/adobe

  • http://www.dopejam.com Tariq Ahmed

    For $500+, I expect to be able to browse the web un-compromised.

  • http://cultofmac.com Leander Kahney

    I just talked to Adrian Ludwig, a group product manager for Flash at Adobe, who gave me a very interesting perspective on the issue. Will be updating shortly.

  • http://cultofmac.com Leander Kahney

    @John Dowdell. I can’t reveal the source, obviously. He/she swore me to secrecy. It’s not Phil Schiller. But they do work on the iPad software side.

  • Jason

    Working for a University with a huge online population I was looking forward to this device for online education. Not having Flash is a deal breaker. We’ve invested way too much into the development of Flash content to abandon it. The line about being the best browsing experience you’ve ever had is a transparent lie.

    So unfortunate. A swing and a miss. Let’s see what v.2 brings.

  • newbie

    iPhone is not 16:9. It’s 3:2.
    Resolution is 480×320, right?
    It’s simple, just calculate 480/320 = 1.5 (or 3:2).

  • Bill

    Adobe has always made “Fat” software. Slow running, huge and finicky. Be it “AiR”, FLASH, or Reader/PDF. Their programs have gotten bigger, but rarely better. As a non-porn surfer, “Flash” does not bring richness to the experience.

  • Steve

    I’m reading this page at the moment and the only Flash content I can (or can’t) see is adverts. I agree that not being able to view embedded video on some sites will be a pain, but implying that Flash gaming would hurt App Store revenue is a bit insane. I still can’t think of the last time I played a Flash game in my browser, yet I do know that I’ve played Canabalt on my iPod, an app that originated from an online Flash game. Flash-based web content is also being slowly phased out, especially with the movement towards UI-oriented Javascript libraries, such as JQuery, and with adoption of CSS3 in browsers, neither of which require as much processing power as Flash.

  • Joe

    Flash routinely crashes on all my Macs. In Safari. In Chrome. Even Air apps. Every few hours, ka-blamo, and there’s the crash dump, plain as day.

    I _wish_ I was joking. It’s pretty much the punchline, unfortunately.

  • Randy

    Flash is a piece of crap, its bloated and up until last week when I blocked flash, it would cause my browser to hang all the freaking time.

    I have no idea what your doing “geek”, but Flash is a serious piece of crap, and Adobe needs to get on the ball and actually fix it.

  • http://www.joshstrike.com Josh Strike

    HTML5 gaming isn’t ever going to be up to the Flash level, so basically this thing is only going to run games coded in Objective C. It’s closed, it’s proprietary, it’s everything everyone says they hate about Flash. Except Flash is actually open now; you can code in Flex, compile with Tamarin and never have to buy anything from Adobe. So this is actually Apple shutting down a more open standard in favor of their own.

    I was really looking forward to the iPad; if it ran OS X, and I could launch Flex, compile my games and run them, I’d have bought one the day it came out.

    I’m starting to think Apple sucks.

  • adobebloatware

    Flash is rarely good for anything but porn advertising and occasionally a semi-decent Flash game once in a while. Adobe has gotten too complacent, too mediocre, that maybe even Microsoft (yes I said Microsoft!) can probably do a superior job at a Flash replacement if they really wanted to.

    Flash is crap.

  • http://www.joshstrike.com Josh Strike

    Apple’s sending out people like the guy above to badmouth Flash. The bottom line is WE NEED A CROSS-PLATFORM TECHNOLOGY for heavy app coding in browsers. Java is just dead; so Flash is it. If Apple wants to write a better one, I’ll use it. But I can’t publish Objective C code to 99% of browsers around the world, and HTML5 is years from being a viable alternative. So either you don’t know what you’re talking about, or you’re being paid to write this BS.

  • Noob

    Everyone should just Flashdance!

  • olof

    The complaints about the lack of flash sounds a lot like the complaints about the iMac lacking a floppy drive and using this strange new port called usb instead of the trusty old adb- and serial ports. Like it was back then, HTML5 isn’t a wide spread standard yet, but it has a lot of potential, and someone needs to push the users into adopting it.

    And for all the people who desperately need flash on a mobile device, Android and Windows mobile is there to satisfy our needs.

  • sbi

    Dear Adobe,

    Shut your mouth until you can make Flash:
    1)NOT repeatedly crash my top of the line MacBookPro
    2)NOT spin up my fans in the few moments it actually runs before crashing

  • Darcy McGee

    Who’s Appel?

  • Saw

    We all know that Flash causing a lot of security problem nowsday.
    Yes, Flash is buggy, especially compare to its competitor Silverlight.
    Just browse to Secunia:
    Adobe Flash Player 10.x
    24 Vulnerabilities

    where Microsoft Silverlight 3.x
    0 Vulnerabilities (Yes, ZERO)

  • http://blogs.adobe.com/jd John Dowdell

    Leander, understood, I had to ask…. ;-)

    Now, considering that we now know he’ll speak with media counter to company policy and anonymously, could you ask him if he ever posts to web discussion boards pseudonymously…? ;-)

    jd/adobe

  • Gugur Daun

    I think the move is political as it is technical.

    I don’t like Flash either. Any instances of Flash movie running on my browser will make my MBPro’s fans spinning at their max. I wish the world could move faster adopting HTML5.

  • Nick I

    Flash 10 is nothing but buggy. I’m glad they are making a stand against Adobe who seems to be doing nothing to fix a year old issue.

    http://getsatisfaction.com/adobe/topics/when_using_adobe_flash_player_10_why_is_there_high_cpu_memory_usage_100_utilization

  • Trax

    I’m onboard with ditching Flash. Flash gets too much free non-sandboxed access to your hard drive. Silverlight does not. I have all new OS installs on my computers and none have flash. The browsers complain piteously, constantly asking to install it. I refuse. Let’s see how long I can hold out.

  • Shawn in Las Vegas

    You Apple geeks can dump on Adobe and Flash all you want and I freely admit that it’s not perfect but the dependability isn’t really the point is it? The fact is that 90% of all video on the Internet is Flash and this has nothing to do with porn. This has to do with the fact that all of the network websites, Hulu and other video sites use flash to watch episodes and you jokers just seem to want to ignore that.

    It’s fine and dandy that Apple wants to use whatever format they want to use, but there aren’t any websites that use it so what does their customer do in the here and now? Someone else pointed out that this device is supposed to provide “the ultimate web experience” and specifically focus on a rich media experience. Well someone needs to explain to me how that’s possible when you can’t watch 90% of the videos on the web? Again, YOU CAN’T WATCH EFFING HULU OR ANY EPISODES ON NETWORK SITES!!!

    Furthermore, why does Apple give a rat’s patootie if Flash is “buggy.” Half of the GD apps on my iPhone crash and/or cause my iPhone to crash on a daily basis and Apple approves all of them. Hell, Safari locked the thing up while I was reading this article and I had to do a soft reboot and wait 5 minutes for the thing to fire up again. And Mac owners, for all of you complaining about how Flash crashes your computer or heats up your CPU, maybe it’s not Flash that’s the problem. I’ve used PC’s and Macs both for 2 decades and I find it kind of interesting that I’ve never had a problem with Flash content overheating a CPU or causing Windows to crash.

    And if Apple’s BS claims had any merit whatsoever, why not just work with Adobe to fix the problems so that their customers can truly have the “ultimate web browsing experience.” Because THAT, you dopes, is what all of this boils down to: alienating the consumer. The fact is that Apple has a big fat 5% of the computer market but they have 30% of the smartphone market. What does that tell you? It tells me that about 80+% of iPhone owners are PC users (and I’m not even getting into the iPod).

    So, you Mac Geeks, there’s your market: the PC users, NOT YOU and we don’t care about all of this technical jargon of how bad and bloated you think Adobe products are. We don’t know anything about all of the of these other formats that Apple is trying to shove down outr throats. All we want is to be able to be able to buy what is nothing more than mobile computer and be able to put whatever the Eff we want on it and watch whatever the Eff we want on it.

    This is only about revenue just like it was only about revenue with the iPhone as well and quite frankly I hope the Feds come down on them like a ton of bricks for this. How many “real” video apps where you can actually watch actual episodes of televison shows and not just the local news in Bengladesh are there? I’ve been able to find 2, tv.com (CBS) and TVU (which is crap). Why do you think that is? Why do you think there is no Hulu app (yes, I know about the rumors… I’ll beleive it when it’s in the App Store) and there are no other network apps like FOX or NBC or ABC that you can watch their shows using? Apple wants to keep squeezing an unsuspecting public used to being able to have anything they want on their PC or other NON-Apple device. It’s disgusting. If it wasn’t a big deal, why not just make it clear in their advertising that you won’t be able to watch 90% of the video content on the web?

    Oh, and for the record, I just got my approval email from Barclay’s for an Apple Account so I could get 12 months Interest free on the 64 GB 3G/WiFi iPad I was going to preorder along with $200 in accessories. Well, guess what? After reading this crap about Flash and the “buggy” comments, Apple and Barclay’s can go eff themselves. I’ll find something else that costs less money. Saw this today on Drudge and it’s looking pretty good to me.

    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/German-tablet-PC-sets-out-to-apf-890973130.html?x=0&.v=7

  • Ned

    I ain’t no Apple geek … but it is about time we stop depending on some proprietary plug-in like Flash. 90% of the web DOES NOT use flash content. I can hardly believe the arrogance from flash defenders here actually having the gaul to accuse some anti-flash people here as paid haters. Come on. Flash has lots of issues … security and flaws are hugely important in the computer world today. The complaints about flash here are all apt. I’ve seen issues with flash since the beginning … it is time we move to open standards. C’est la vie.

  • http://appsforipads.net MaggieB

    With a slew of tablets set to give the iPad a run for its money… they are going to have to add Flash to keep up, or be left as the others start taking over its #1 spot.