Quote:
Originally Posted by dmaul1114
That's because free flash games, programs etc. on the web would render a lot of stuff in their App store useless. And thus they wouldn't get their cut from selling an App of a game that you can play in Flash on the web for free etc.
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The issue of Flash on the iPhone OS is a lot more complex and political and is ultimately founded in the fact that Apple and Adobe are prime competitors for content creation apps and content delivery structures. (In fact John Gruber has pointed out that the animosity between Apple and Adobe may reach back to the days of Display Postscript on the Next.)
Flash on OSX is well known to cause a lot of crashes, though this may simply reflect the extent to which it's used. Adobe says they want to fix that, but need greater access to core, undocumented parts of the OS. Apple doesn't want to give them that access. Photoshop used to be the Mac's 'killer app', yet for the past few years it has run better on the PC (PS's code is such a spaghetti that just porting it to Cocoa was a major task, leading to a long delay for an intel-native version and the continued lack of 64bit functionality on OSX).
The lack of Flash is just one result of a long and complex history in which both parties have some blame. Apple's response has been to construct a new paradigm based on HTML5 and h.264, and it's largely worked for the iPhone with its small-screen experience. The fact remains, though, that without Flash you're not getting the whole web, and that may become more evident for those who use the iPad for general browsing.