Kyle LeBoeuf

This morning, Apple posted an open letter from Steve Jobs to the technology community in which he explains in great detail Apple’s stance towards using Flash in it’s iPhone OS products.

He pretty much hits the nail on the head, in true Steve Jobs fashion.

Adobe’s platform is closed and proprietary, insecure, unstable, and simply is not the best solution for touch-based computing as Apple is trying to define it.

While Apple does use plenty of proprietary software and tools, the big difference is Apple’s contributions to open-source computing. Apple incorporates a lot of open elements into it’s own products.

Also, allowing developers to develop in Flash brings their products away from the iPhone. From a business standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. Apple wants developers to code for the iPhone using it’s own tools because that is the best way to make quality applications for the platform, and that will bring the best apps and developers to the iPhone OS platform.

From the letter, on Adobe’s approach to iPhone development with Flash:

“We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.”

You’re only as good as your weakest link. Apple is removing the weakest link. Goodbye Adobe.