Adobe Announces Flash Can Build iPhone Apps, But What's The Catch?

Today Adobe announced that the new version of the Flash development tool, Flash Professional CS5, will allow developers to use ActionScript and most of the Flash APIs to build native iPhone applications. Note that this does not mean that the Flash player now runs on iPhones. In other words you can't go to a website that has Flash content and see that content on the iPhone. But what you can do is take flash content and compile that content into a traditional iPhone compatible app that customers could download from the app store.

Basically what this means is that instead of building iPhone apps with Apple's tools, you can build iPhone apps with Adobe's Flash tools. This is a huge deal for the million or so Flash developers that can now build iPhone applications without learning new skills. It’s also great for Flash developers that already have apps that may be easily ported to the iPhone.

But what's the catch?

Well as far as I can tell, the biggest catch is the Flash tooling stack is heavy. These days, much Flash application development is done with Flex, which is a set of libraries that make it easy to do things like buttons and scrollable areas, and windows and such. Nowhere in the announcement is there any mention of Flex. This is telling.

What is more telling is that they do talk about performance issues. And so my gut is that using Flash tools to develop iPhone apps will not exactly yield high performance applications comparable to what you can develop using Apples tools. And I suspect using Flex is so slow that they couldn't even bring themselves to mention it in their announcement.

The other interesting question is whether there are battery life implications to using Flash tools and libraries on the iPhone.

That said, even a slow Flash tool set for the iPhone is a huge deal for the Flash development community. Because even if you have to develop more cautiously in order to have decent performance, being able to use existing skills and content is major. Of course there is lots more we need to see before we can see exactly how helpful this will really be.

But the most interesting question out of all this is how Apple will react, and what Adobe's success here might mean. Now I am not saying that Apple can or will stop Adobe from launching this tool. I am sure Apple has already given Adobe the thumbs up if for no other reason than that Apple can’t be seen as prohibiting people from writing compilers for the iPhone. That would just be too creepy. But what Adobe is trying to do here, with its recent announcements that the Flash player is going to be on every smart phone on the market including Blackberry, Android, Palm and Windows Mobile, is to be the only cross platform way to build mobile apps.

Apple can't like that.

But there is really not much they can do about it. And if Adobe can ultimately do a good enough job to get developers writing cross platform iPhone apps, this could be a major threat to Apple's app store hegemony in the same way that the Web browser has neutralized windows as a critical application development platform target. No one writes apps for Windows anymore. Everyone is writing for the web. Of course HTML 5 could play a similar role but my gut tells me HTML 5 will be too fragmented to be successful in the short term, and that Apple has no incentive to provide real HTML 5 development tools that access the iPhone's hardware APIs and that would undercut their Apple’s own proprietary strength.

Indeed we do live in interesting times.

Can't We Disagree Without Being Disagreeable

Today I read this blog post by Dave McClure that I'd like to talk about.

Dave is an investor in Mint, a company that was recently acquired by Intuit, along with being a generally well respected guy in the tech universe.

Dave is apparently mad because another prominent blogger, Jason Fried, CEO of 37Signals, wrote that he suspected, based purely on his gut, that the Mint investors probably forced the CEO and founder of Mint, Aaron Patzer, to sell early in an unethical greed induced desire to cash out.

Jason's belief was that Mint had an opportunity to create a category killing product, and that selling out to Intuit was effectively like selling out to the dark side.

This all happened a couple of weeks ago, and it appears that Jason was wrong at least about whether the investors forced him to sell. The sale price was 170 million, and so it is not hard to imagine that Aaron actually thought it was a good idea. He says that he was not forced and that he was very happy about the deal.

But none of that is the point of this post.

The point is that Dave's post is an expletive filled over-the-top rant that just seems, well, mean spirited. Here are some of the high points.

[disclosure: the views expressed below are my own, and do not in any way represent the official position or perspective of either Mint.com or Founders Fund... so please fuck off.]

I presume the fuck off part above is aimed at people like me who he knew would comment on this post.

Memo to Jason Fried: Sorry, You're Fucking Wrong

Fucking Wrong, and Irresponsible Conjecture & Hyperbole

Completely Fucking Wrong, and in fact Exactly the Opposite trend is going on, and finally

Perhaps you might want to contact one of these investors -- who, like me, are all publicly listed in Mint's entry on Crunchbase -- and ASK one of them, before you blow such a wild assertion out of your ass?

if you're simply too damn lazy to do some basic research, maybe you could just ask any experienced entrepreneur or venture investor why in the hell would it make any fucking sense for Series B investor Benchmark to encourage a sale that's likely only 4-5x its investment

In short, your logic here is not only faulty, it's piss-poor and reveals your absolute ignorance of what goes on in the venture world.

Dave then caps it off with:

And Jason: now that i've ripped you a new one, i'd like to apologize for all the harsh commentary and say that altho i disagree with you on this issue, i still think you're an amazing entrepreneur, and i still use your products. Happy to buy you a beer and shoot the shit anytime.

Then, after being taken to task by a commenter he responds, in part by saying:

i don't know if you're much older than my 43 years, but started programming ~30 years ago, have worked in Silicon Valley for over 20, founded & sold my own business in the 90's, worked at PayPal in the early days before IPO, ran marketing for a few years at Simply Hired, and -- as noted above -- was an investor in Mint.com, as well as over 50 companies in the past 5 years.

This piece serves as a really great example of what prominent people in our or any community ought not be doing. In fact, it is a really great example of what's wrong with discourse in the modern high speed communications world. This is particularly true in the political sphere, but also broadly true in the online world. I fully realize that this kind of talk is part of human nature, and that nothing I say is going to change it. Still, it is shocking when you read someone as prominent as Dave McClure, writing a blog post like this. Whatever offense he believes Jason Fried committed, his piece makes Jason's post seem mild and uncontroversial.

I dunno. Call me silly. But can't we disagree without calling each other names, and using "fuck" every other sentence, and trying to diminish people's arguments by foisting your resume on them?

By the way, I suspect Dave is a totally decent person who doesn't behave this way in person, and who I'd happily buy a beer for and shoot the shit any time.