Cathode Tan - Games, Media and Geek Stuff
logo design by man bytes blog

Friday, April 09, 2010

Rumor Mill: Apple Blames Multitasking For Flash Ban

The primary reason for the change, say sources familiar with Apple's plans, is to support sophisticated new multitasking APIs in iPhone 4.0. The system will now be evaluating apps as they run in order to implement smart multitasking. It can't do this if apps are running within a runtime or are cross compiled with a foreign structure that doesn't behave identically to a native C/C++/Obj-C app.

"[The operating system] can't swap out resources, it can't pause some threads while allowing others to run, it can't selectively notify, etc. Apple needs full access to a properly-compiled app to do the pull off the tricks they are with this new OS," wrote one reader under the name Ktappe
-- Mac Rumors (via Apple Insider)

So you can't create a Flash app because of an OS that hasn't been released yet with a feature for essentially one of the iPhone models (and later, iPads). Wow - hope that face didn't need that nose after all. Even if this is accurate, it hardly sidesteps what is a big old FU to Adobe in terms of timing and a complete lack of conversation on the topic. Also, it seems a bit of an artificial crisis - I'm to believe that all Cocoa and all Carbon apps will play nice with the new multitasking API whereas Flash ones would start crashing phones? That doesn't sound sophisticated ... that sounds fragile.

2 comments:

Thomas said...

It's Daniel Eran Dilger saying this. The credibility is somewhere around basement level.

One of my coworkers has the theory that this whole thing reeks of Steve Jobs being personally pissed off at Adobe and Android, and I think she may be right. There's just no real good technical reason for it.

Steve said...

I call bullshit. The thing is, this could be easily solved on a technical level. If the app doesn't look right in whatever ephemeral way Apple's talking about here, simply refuse to let it run in the background. Done.

You know how I know this is possible? Because if it wasn't how would they know an app was compiled from flash in the first place? How could they ban such apps from the store?

I'm going to upgrade my iPhone to a new one this year. I suspect that if Apple keeps this shit up I'll be moving to Android the next time.