This is Kristen O'Brien, Managing Editor at NFX, and this is the founder list. Audible versions of essays from technology's most important leaders selected by the founder community. In this episode of the founder's list, we detail a memo written by Steve Jobs in April of 2010 released internally to his employees at Apple. In the following memo, he addresses criticism from Adobe about Apple's lack of support for Flash and its associated products, read by NFX.
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer adopting their post script language for our new laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together Pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart.
Apple went through its near death experience and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today, the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers, Mac users buy around half of Adobe's creative suite products, but beyond that, there are few joint interests. I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe's Flash products that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on Iphones, Ipods, and Ipads.
Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven They say we want to protect our app store, but in reality, it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system and that flash is open, but in fact, the opposite is true. Pete me explain. First, there's open. Adobe's flash products are a 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe and Adobe has sole authority Pete their future enhancement, pricing, etcetera.
While Adobe's flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system. Apple has many proprietary products too, though the operating system for the Iphone, ipod, and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open.
Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, all open standards, Apple's mobile devices all ship with high performance low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple Google, and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, topography, animations, and transitions without relying on third party browser plugins like Flash.
HTML 5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member. Apple even creates open standards for the web, For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created web kit, a complete open source HTML5 rendering engine that is at part of the safari web browser used in all of our products. Webkit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android's browser. Palm uses it. Nokia uses and rim Blackberry has announced they will use it too.
Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft's uses web kit. By making its web kit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers. 2nd, there's the full web. Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access the full web because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don't say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, 8.264, and viewable on iPhones, ipods, and iPads.
YouTube with an estimated 40% of the web's video shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, tying the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated People, National Geographic, and many, many others. IPhone, ipod, and iPad users aren't missing much video.
Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Morgan, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment is available for iPhone, ipod, and iPad than for any other platform in the world. 3rd, there's reliability, security, and performance. Symantech recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009.
We also know firsthand that Flash is the number one reason Max Crash We've been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don't want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, Ipods, and iPads by adding Flash. In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, Morgan few years now, we have never seen it.
Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009 Then the second half of 2009, then the first half of twenty ten, and now they say the second half of twenty ten. We think it will eventually ship but we're glad we didn't hold our breath. Who knows how it'll perform? 4th, there's battery life. To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware. Decoding it in software uses too much power.
Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called 8.264, an industry standard that is used in every Blu ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google, for YouTube, Vimeo, Netflix, and many other companies. Although Flash has recently added support for 8.264, the video on almost all flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips that must be run-in software.
The difference is striking On an iPhone, for example, 8.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is entirely drained. When websites recode their videos using H 264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple's safari and Google's Chrome without any plugins whatsoever and look great on Iphones, Ipods, and iPads. 5th, there's touch.
Flash was designed for PCs using mice not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many flash websites rely on rollovers, which are pop up menus Morgan other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple's revolutionary multi touch interface doesn't use a mouse and there is no concept of a rollover.
Most flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch based devices If developers need to rewrite their flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript? Even if iPhones, iPads and iPads ran Flint, it would not solve the problem that most flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch based devices. 6th, the most important reason.
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary has major technical drawbacks and doesn't support touch based devices, there's an even more important reason we do not allow flash on iPhones, iPads, and iPads. We've discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in substandard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on 3rd party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage platform enhancements if and when the 3rd 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 3rd party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The 3rd party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported plat forms. 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're not available on our competitor's platforms. Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe's goal to help developers write the best iPhone, ipod, and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps, and Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple's platforms.
For example, although macOS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully, Coco, 2 weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third party developer to fully adopt macOS X. Our motivation is simple. We want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform to create the best apps the world has ever seen.
We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful fun, and useful applications. Everyone wins. We sell more devices because we have the best apps. Developers reach a wider and wider audience in customer base and users are continually delighted by best and broadest selection of apps on any platform. Conclusion. Flash was created during the PC era, for PCs and mice.
Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond Pete. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces, and open web standards. All areas where flash falls short. The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple's mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content.
And the 250,000 apps on Apple's app store proves that Flash isn't necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including James. New open standards created in the mobile era such as HTML5 will win on mobile devices and PCs too. Perhaps Adobe should focus more on create great HTML5 tools for the future and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
For more audio essays from the people who book companies like Instacart, Facebook, Trello, HubSpot, and Dropbox, visit the founder list at nfx.com, or subscribe to the nfx podcast at podcast.nfx com or wherever you get your podcasts.