Dobeweb

Okay,first let me say that I love my MacBook and am a big supported of Apple. However, after reading the post about Pandora on cnet I am a little concerned. The context of the article is just speculation at this point about how enabling Flash on the iPhone could be a revenue hit to Apple. Pandora allows users to listen to and bookmark music streaming within the browser via the Flash Player. It then allows users to purchase their bookmarked music from either Amazon.com or Apple through iTunes.

The article speculates that if the iPhone or iPod touch had the Flash Player, users would simply go to Pandoa.com and play music from their bookmarks and stations without the need to ever purchase. This seems like a valid concern however if this is truly a reason why Apple is blocking the Flash player, then I have to say I am very disappointed.

Mr. Jobs, don’t play the old games of our friends in Redmond WA, just make it a better experience to continue to purchase music and users will continue to line up with dollars in hand. To hold back technology simply to protect your assets is not something I would expect from Apple.

I don’t see where Pandora can’t easily address this in at least two major different ways on the iPhone - First off, on today’s iPhone one can probably build an Ajax web application that uses Quicktime for streaming audio and video, using the same standards that Flash supports - H264 (MP4) and MP3. (Yeah, it’s not as simple as writing a little Flex app, but oh well…)

The better option would be to download the recently released SDK, and release a full Pandora client application in June. Since it is a streaming service, it isn’t going to have any storage problems, and it can utilize all of the advanced Audio Unit and Quicktime features that are available for it. It can easily sync back to the web, and everyone will benefit.

Now if Pandora writes this iPhone application, submits it to Apple for the App store, and gets turned down for some lame reason - then this “story” would have more legs. But at this point, I really doubt that the upper management of Apple are keeping Flash off of the iPhone to spite Pandora. I don’t think they know OR care about it one way or the other.

I’m a Flex developer, but I can see why Apple doesn’t see Flash as being really ready for the iPhone - even ignoring the possible performance issues, there are bigger problems like UI integration (multi-touch, gestures, accelerometer, etc.) that need to be dealt with. Is Adobe going to provide a truly iPhone centric version of Flash, that provides new features that weren’t work on other platforms?

If you look at the iPhone’s SDK, which uses many of the same technologies as OSX on the desktop, notice how the Macintosh version of Interface Builder isn’t supported. I bet a lot of lazy Mac developers would LOVE to be able to just push a single button and have their current programs running on the iPhone. But it can’t (or shouldn’t) be done because of the differences between a desktop machine and a touch-based phone.

written by Flex \\ tags: apple, Flash Player, Flex 2, flex 3, Flex app, iPhone application, mac, Moxie, Pandora