No more iphone support.....

[bluemagica]

Adobe is halting development of a Flash-to-iPhone software tool introduced with its Creative Suite 5 last week, dashing the hopes of many that Flash will be supported in future iPhone updates. The move further escalates tensions between Apple and Adobe. Adobe now says it plans to concentrate on developing for Google's Android mobile operating system, according to a blog post by Mike Chambers, Flash platform product manager for Adobe.

Adobe's move comes hot on the heels of Apple's new iPhone OS developer agreement, introduced last week, which prohibits developers to use third-party app compilers, such as Adobe's own tool included in Flash CS5. Despite halting development for the Flash-to-iPhone compiler. Chambers said Adobe would still be shipping the tool with Flash CS5.

Source:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/19466...or_iphone.html

It seems, the silent-war has finally ended with adobe being forced to realize that it has been banned on iphone/ipad. As a developer what are your opinions?

[newblack]

i think apple is acting very vindictively with the restriction that prompted this. to be perfectly honest, i don't really get it--this effects developers, and no one else. nobody else gives a ****. apple stands to make money off of anyone who places even a free app in their store. developers are a huge part of adobe's market though, so maybe it really is just a stab for abandoning their OS all those years ago. maybe apple's trying to devalue adobe so they can buy them at a discount!

like i said, apple's being a dick on this one, but they have every right to be. right now mobile's the meteoric market, not web; and if flash isn't on that sweet ride it's going to fade. make no mistake abou tit, flash not being included on these popular platforms is a crippling injury. i won't be hanging around hoping that a company that didn't give developers what they wanted while at full stride, suddenly will when limping.

[tomsamson]

I´d find it sad and annoying when this rule change by Apple really affects any other technology/middleware than flash at the end because it is very obvious that it was made to prevent flash from getting on there after Adobe trying to sneak it in (after Apple told em they don´t want it on their devices due to lousy performance).
I also find it laughable that one of Adobe´s ill chosen spokesman, Mike Chambers, listed some points regarding how their iPhone exporter wasn´t futile even if it now doesn´t allow deploying to the app store and one of those points was that they would have prooven that they can create a solution that allows to create well performing iPhone apps and there would be no technical reasoning for why it is not allowed.
Come on Mike, enough of the coolaid for you, dunno which flash made apps that guy tried but most apps i tried using the flash exporter for iPhone ran very poorly on pre 3gs devices if they started up and ran without crahsing at all.
Its also not without a reason that any mobile device demo apps Adobe shows are all featuring basic 2D content because of course Adobe´s solution obviously can at best handle that smoothly while with most other middleware one can run way way more complex stuff on the same device with ease.

I also find it ridiculous that some Adobe spokes persons act as if it was oh so surprising to get kicked out by Apple (any other tech/middleware provider can say that honestly, Adobe can´t because they were clearly told to stay out over a year ago).
I find it even more ridiculous that Adobe now tries to act as if Apple is oh so evil for being closed platform and Adobe would be oh so great for instead giving its developers so much freedom of choice.
Seriously?
Adobe is creating largely closed technology and would like the developer base to use their technologies to create content running on their closed runtimes.
Adobe has for years been acting against open standards in many ways, even if in public often posing as if the contrary was the case.
Now they are suddenly talking more loudly about HTML5 deploy, let´s see how that evolves.
I agree with newblack, overall this situation really doesn´t look good at all for flash because Adobe can say all day long flash is a defacto standard because its on 99% of internet connected pcs, its just less and less true the more people surf the internet via other devices where flash is either not available or largely runs at sucky performance or if it achieves reasonable framerate still is a massive battery drainer because it keeps the cpu boiling to unreasonable degree all the time.

So yeah, i´m back to the same view i have for a while with Flash and Adobe:
I use it for what its a good choice, which are less and less things over time but i heavily dislike some of its spokespersons and hype/ lie messages they put out and don´t think it looks all that good the longer Adobe wastes time trying to fool everyone instead of giving the content creator base what a huge chunk has been asking for for many years.

[dandylion13]

Yes, Adobe is banning Flash on the iPhone, but it's not banning developers.
Neither Apple or Adobe is stopping anyone from building iPhone apps or making Flash games for the web.

Is the problem just that we don't want to learn another technology?
I agree, it's a pain, but that's just state of the industry as is it's been over the last 60 years.

If you want to build websites, you have to learn HTML and CSS. If you want to do back-end programming, learn PHP. It's as unrealistic to expect Flash to help you make iPhone apps as it is to expect that one can write Chinese poetry using English.

Even in the best case scenario, the iPhone export is a terrible choice for creating iPhone apps. Most developers need a few different development tools in their back pockets to prosper in a quickly changing and highly competitive industry like this. The biggest mistake you can make is to keep all your eggs in one basket.

Let's hope Adobe now turns all it's resources to GPU support and making the player really lean and fast

[tomsamson]

I couldn´t agree more
Sure its way less easy going to learn something new rather than just keep on using what one is used to and sure, in theory it would be AWESOME to have one middleware that can deploy to all platforms on earth and it would actually be good performing compeititve results one achieves with it.
Reality is though that if there is or will be any such middleware than its not flash right now at all and probably not in the future either.
Adobe has not been up to it on any other device than pcs in the last 10 years to be honest.
One can deploy to many devices, but there are way too many drawbacks when using flash on anything else than a pc, biggest one of course being sucky performance compared to many other solutions on most platforms.

[dandylion13]

I
I also find it ridiculous that some Adobe spokes persons act as if it was oh so surprising to get kicked out by Apple (any other tech/middleware provider can say that honestly, Adobe can´t because they were clearly told to stay out over a year ago).

Tomsamson, I also find this amazing and puzzling.
On the surface, it seems like utter foolishness on Adobe's part.

To base a major feature of CS5 on a competitor's product without a formal agreement, and pretty clear understanding by everyone that it was illegal?

Think of all the time an money wasted on this
And CS5 now has this obsolete dead weight clinging to it.

Also, think of the real risk that it put us developers in: If we trusted Adobe and built iPhone apps with CS5, who would be responsible if Apple pulled the plug on our apps? We could be sued by our clients.

[tomsamson]

Yeah, well, to me it looks like anything Adobe does recently on this topic is to put pressure on Apple by getting all its developer base upset on Apple.
Too bad there are too many people who know too much about this to be cheated by Adobe´s PR crew this time.
Adobe has tried to pull a big bluff there by sneaking in the exporter made apps into the app store and acting as if they were fine doing that while now recent news of course show that the actual state was that apple is against it just like over a year ago where they publicly said it.
I agree it would be a disaster to now still invest into creating apps using the flash solution. With other middleware where its up in the air how and if they will be affected by Apple´s rule change one can decide whether one wants to continue development using this or that tech, with flash its very clear Apple is against it, so yeah..

[Alluvian]

Does this affect things like PixelWave at all?
http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=809989

I had been eyeing that up in conjunction with getting some experience with MVC to keep the door open for relatively easy ports. I never saw myself using the cs5 export, but pixelwave had me interested.

[newblack]

I think my apathy for Adobe says a lot considering how much of my work has targeted the Flash platform over the past few years. I know plenty of developers who are seriously pissed at Apple, taking their actions as a personal affront somehow; but that mindset just strikes me as juvenile. Apple has shown that they will do just fine without Adobe, while Adobe has shown they are an irresponsible, spoiled little teenager.

It will be interesting to see how CS5 plays out and what drama unfolds out of the iPhone exporter, but only because I'll be watching from behind XCode!

[dandylion13]

Does this affect things like PixelWave at all?

Hi Alluvian
No, Pixelwave is a pure C/Objective C API, so it's a not a problem.

[tomsamson]

yes, dandylion is right =)
And yeah, newblack is right, too, Adobe to me has shown more than ever before how heavily irresponsible they are towards us, the developers.
As developers we should be able to trust them at least so far that they only create and announce something when they have at least made clear they are allowed to release that.
After Apple told them clearly they´re not wanted on the idevices as developers we should be able to expect that they talked with Apple to get approval for doing their exporter, which obviously clearly they haven´t done and now the end result is that many probably invested a lot in flash content creation time or waiting for a flash solution and are now hit badly. Next to Adobe´s moves also leading to Apple changing that rule in first place and that way affecting many other solution providers who actually did create well performing solutions contrary to Adobe.

There are still many use cases where flash is a valid choice (mainly on the web or on consoles in case one uses third party accelerated solutions), but yeah, man, with some of the decisions Adobe is doing and some (most) things Adobe spokespersons are saying i really don´t know anymore if i should laugh about it or get angry.

[Ray Beez]

I wish this topic would die already.

[Squize]

What's more interesting atm is what's going to happen to the already live middleware.

When I logged into iConnect the other day ( A front-end for the developer part of the appStore, like Mochi's dashboard ) there was a note stating that I had to agree to a new agreement before being able to upload / amend anything under our account.
Following this first agreement was a more detailed one with the magic 331 clause.

Basically the appStore is shut down not just for pre-release Adobe software, but Unity et al.

I'd be very surprised if the door wasn't re-opened ( Somehow ) for Unity, basically 331 is just to shut Flash out, but right now no Unity games are allowed on there, which means a lot of small development teams are screwed.

In terms of CS5, it's Android all the way now baby. Apparently AIR 2.5 runs really well on Android phones ( Google are more than happy to snuggle up to Adobe ) so looks like I'm investing in a new phone ( Anyone want to buy a 3G iPod Touch ? ).

Squize.

[tomsamson]

to Ray: sorry man, this topic will probably not be over until OS 4.0 is available in final version for a while.

to Squize: I´m not really worried for unity, its not verified by any means at this point but i feel like Apple wouldn´t shut out those middleware providers which lead to some of the most sold App Store games. We´ll see.

Regarding Air "apparently running very well" on Android phones is that something you know from first hand tests or based on the promo videos some Adobe close guys put out?
I´ll give the Air thing a try on an Android device out of curiosity but i don´t expect it to perform much different than what i expect from flash by now on other mobile platforms (so at best ok for basic 2D stuff with not a lot moving around and ideally nothing that´s not a bitmap).

[Squize]

I'm on the Air beta but haven't tried it yet.

It's what I've heard is from other devs, it's pointless listening to any company's spin. It's still only going to be Flash, but a lot of people have said porting their iPhone apps took next to no time and ran at full frame rate without having to do a fraction of the optimisations that was needed for iPhone stuff.

Obviously this is all 2nd hand info, it's not until you can play with it yourself doing the sort of game you want to do that you can tell for sure, but the general vibe seems to be Android loves Flash a lot more than the iPhone did.

Squize.

[Alluvian]

Could someone explain to me exactly what the CS5 exporter did?

Was it a code generator which converted AS3 into objective c? I thought the end result was a somewhat poorly optimized objective c entity.

If that is the case, I don't think Adobe was out of their minds to think that Apple would not care about where the objective c came from. How is the appstore even telling if it was created using CS5, are they basically figuring it out from the common libraries? Forgive my ignorance on the matter.

Seems like it is a slippery slope. What dev tool is next? Arguing about how lousy the dev too may or may not have been is beside the point really, there are probably some applications where it would have been adequate.

I have an actionscript 2 everquest 2 AAXP calculator for example that has NO need to run fast or optimized. If that was AS3 I may have considered bringing it up to date and throwing it out as a free app just because there might be 2 people out there who found it useful on their phone, heh.

If apple buys or develops a tool similar to unity, then could they ban all the unity apps to get people using their tool? I feel like chicken little here, but there seems to be no reason for this other than to spite Adobe. I am sure there are objective c native apps that run as bad or worse than a CS5 exported app. Is 'runs like doodoo' a reason for apple to not pass an app? Not rhetorical, it might be, I have not read the agreement at all.

[tomsamson]

@Squize: I see, yeah, probably best to try it oneself once its released in final form.

@Alluvian: The flash to iPhone exporter deployed an IPA file from an AS3 project, it achieved that by using LLVM, not going the official Apple way of deploying an xcode project. There was a nice blog post somewhere that analyzed in detail how the code of a flash made iPhone app differs from a "regular" xcode produced one, i don´t have the link handy since it has been some months but some googling on flash ipa llvm or similar tags should do it.
In short, yes, it would probably be easily possible for apple to identify flash made apps since they were different in final code in a few areas and since apple already has semi automated testing and verifying mechanisms going on during the app review process as far as is known, they would have probably spotted it easily.

I totally understand your view as developer thinking hey, whom does it hurt if i put this or that app out there on the device, maybe even for free, if at the end it doesn´t perform that well, noone is hurt.

On the other side, while personally i think it was no good idea in first place to put each single app through a review process, now that Apple is doing it that way for a while i can see why from their side they probably saw flash content getting on there as possible disaster.
They review and approve each single app so that is real time and money spend per app, so even if an app doesn´t run poorly and neither crashes its already a loss for apple financially if it doesn´t bring any returns, next to the review and approval time also in server/backend/traffic costs.
(Of course there may be exceptions to that rule like if a free app was so great and such a hit that it actually positively affected the iPhone´s or app store´s reputation or lead to other profits indirectly).

If an app further than just bringing apple no money directly also runs poorly and/or crashes and/or is a huge battery drainer for no obvious reason then that can lead to both a hit on reputation for Apple´s devices aswell as even more costs due to more customer support work needing to be done in some cases.
Anything that already doesn´t perform nicely enough by Apple´s standards now would then probably have even way more issues once OS4 hits and some apps start doing semi multi tasking type stuff in the background regularly, taking away from the ressources left for any other app running.

Now all that can happen with any app, first party xcode made just like third party middleware made, its just that Adobe has yet to proove that it can run content at reasonable performance while using a reasonable amount of system resources compared to other technologies. Obviously Apple felt like Adobe hasn´t prooved that well enough and obviously they also didn´t like the way Adobe still managed to get their thing in there without Apple´s consent. So now we know what happens when you try that with Apple.
Now we have a >nice< mess of all sides overreacting in return

Regarding Adobe´s moves i think i already made my view pretty clear =) Regarding Apple´s actions i´m torn apart some since it is not as clear and very different depending on from which side one looks at it.

When one sees Apple as a creator of devices like macs/desktop machines and likewise expects openness and fewer regulation like on those, then yeah, the recent rule changes are a shock for developers.
But when one thinks about the flood of apps on the app store despite apple already reviewing each single one i get why they want to limit some things more than before.
It also was less apparent before but clearly is way more now: Apple obviously wants to establish something like the eco system on consoles for any of their devices besides work notebooks and desktops: So a more closed, more regulated system where maybe in return who stays in or gets in after fiercer regulation in theory also has a higher chance for some higher profit.
Whether that setup is overall great or miserable is personal preference of course, it surely has many upsides and downsides, i just find it weird that some now declare Apple as the new over regulatory restrictive force while few seem to consider that its nothing new and going on in the console market for many generations.
(And checking back on our broad first hand and wikipedia based history knowledge, its easily visible, that, as always, history repeats itself: Interesting things to look up regarding that are how the console market crashed a while back thanks to each tom and dick throwing out way too many games and then Nintendo and a few others stepped in revitalizing it, mainly by enforcing way stricter publishing terms initially (then people later flocked to ps1 thanks to its less strict terms again, and so on and so on, its a forth and back, sometimes hard to tell where in the cycle we are )

Looking at consumers most people probably couldn´t care less about all of this. Sure, some geeks will flock more to android now, but does average joe from the street really care if apps made with flash are allowed on his iPhone? Dunno. As long as there are enough apps to choose from probably not. And while for some it might feel like a slap in the face to developers if one wants to see it like that, as i said, there are a few more sides to this, its not just black and white, there are probably many reasons why apple is doing these things to protect themselves, but also why they do it to protect their consumers and as weird as it may sound initially, many reasons why its done to protect their developers.

[bluemagica]

well, now what are we small-time devs supposed to do? to me, that clause isn't very clear, and it might get softwares like unity and such get banned on iphone too, infact, any middleware other than their own might be hanging on the line.....so developing apps for iphone seems pretty dangerous at this stage.
Instead of this battle, i wish adobe and apple would cooperate to improve the iphone port of the player or a better lightweight builder for iphone, but i guess that's impossible.

[tomsamson]

Regarding iPhone dev with anything else than flash yes its probably safest to use a way that for sure still complies with Apple´s rule change, which of course would severely limit the amount of options compared to the way it was before.
Besides that its personal choice and risk evaluation whether one wants to use something where its not 100% sure yet whether it will be allowed onto the app store in the future.
Regarding the special position of Apple and Flash: Yours is a good suggestion that Adobe should surely have followed instead of trying to pull that childish backdoor bullyness that caused all that, but yeah, i think meanwhile its a bit late for that, i feel like too much bad blood has been spread and its unlikely that those two will happily get along again as long as the same guys are sitting at the companies who insulted the other side with heavy insults on their blogs not too long ago.

[Alluvian]

Being a dev for appstore has always been pretty risky. They can ban or pull anything for pretty much any reason, and making any money almost seems like a lottery ticket to get on the featured list where you make really good money until you drop off that list.