This is not true at all. Jobs didn't include Flash on the iPhone because of its performance requirements.
Apple didn't realize how important the App Store would be to the device's popularity when the iPhone initially launched. It appeared that the intent was to keep it a closed, curated platform where only Apple and its partners could ship products for it. This was the strategy that they had established for third party iPod clickwheel games.
In fact, Apple initially raved about how great "Web Apps" would be on the device, and showcased crude web based games at WWDC 2007.
It was largely due to developer outcry that Apple responded with the App Store, and it was a much larger hit than anyone predicted. The business savvy was in their ability to roll with it.
the SDK was planned from the beginning, not the result of developer outcry—though it certainly didn't hurt. apple had to make sure that the APIs were solid before releasing them to everyone. that takes time.
The SDK was around from the beginning, but planned for a curated channel of third parties that Apple selected itself. Apple wsa incredibly worried about security issues on the device, and initially tried to satisfy everyday developers with: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/06/11iPhone-to-Support-...
The outcry was so fierce and sustained that around 3 months later, Apple backpedaled on this strategy and Jobs himself announced that they would open the platform up.
Again, the performance requirements of Canvas, DOM, JS 1.5 and CSS3 are far higher than AVM2/AS3/Flash 10. They just take 5x as much processing power to perform the same graphics tasks. This isn't a fact in doubt, but I feel obligated to respond everytime someone brings up this argument. It's not true. If they wanted a faster platform, they would have chucked webkit and written JS2 or AS3 into their browser.
Well, with Flash they were also beholden to Adobe to fix bugs and optimize it for whatever GPU they wanted to use.
I'm not sure it does take 5x as much processing power, especially when you can ship things off to the GPU. You have to remember that these decisions were made a few years ago, and Adobe Flash video on mobile (where available) has always lacked the performance of native apps/HTML5 video.
As far as Flash mobile performance is concerned, the main issue at the time was constrained to video playback. I am not debating that Canvas is slow, as is the Flash 10 software-blitted graphics Stage.
Both Flash and Canvas are moving towards GPU accelerated rendering pipelines, and Adobe is also making proposals on the HTML5 side, like CSS Shaders, but that's a separate discussion.
My beef was the idea that Apple knew that third party games would be one of the most popular draws to their iOS products. Nobody did (except perhaps game developers themselves).
@doomlaser - it's interesting to hear the argument put that way, because nothing I use flash for involves video delivery (or very little of it). Video delivery is to flash what hot topic was to...whatever my favorite bands were in 1995. It's the generic mass market application of something arguably meaningful, useful, appealing and capable of changing the world. Below that are the banner ads. But in the middle, it's true, there's this wide audience for streamed video that should have been served by browser technologies long ago, and that Flash really should never have been a part of, except that it filled a void as the only plugin widely enough adopted to support cross-platform video.
The loss of video to native browser technologies takes nothing away from the things Flash has to recommend it as a method for blitting graphics to the screen. It's one thing to try and do it with canvas and divs in Safari -- it's a joke getting things to line up, but it's not impossible. But if you want it to look the same in IE? A guy's supposed to run a startup and worry about Firefox reversioning every 4 weeks at the same time? Realistically, if I wasn't running my app in Flex I wouldn't have a company; I'd have a giant pile of IF IE statements and a bigger list of complaints.
So this clock is where the rubber meets the road, in a funny experimental way. It's got "no flash" in the title, so we can assume this is where an HTML5/JS proponent with some coding savvy thinks the line should be drawn; this is what can be achieved with the technology available cross-browser given the state of the DOM art. And I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying that it's nonsensical to throw out good tools to prove you can do something with bad ones.
Oh, I'm pretty much totally with you about the silliness of HTML5/JS/Canvas animations that keep popping up on HN. I agree that they all tend to run slow, use too much CPU, and take too much code to produce.
Apple didn't realize how important the App Store would be to the device's popularity when the iPhone initially launched. It appeared that the intent was to keep it a closed, curated platform where only Apple and its partners could ship products for it. This was the strategy that they had established for third party iPod clickwheel games.
In fact, Apple initially raved about how great "Web Apps" would be on the device, and showcased crude web based games at WWDC 2007.
It was largely due to developer outcry that Apple responded with the App Store, and it was a much larger hit than anyone predicted. The business savvy was in their ability to roll with it.