Steve Jobs: Flash is unnecessary

Steve Jobs has today published a long essay explaining why Apple isn’t interested in letting the multimedia platform – popular on the web – run on its handheld devices.

The Apple CEO goes so far to brand the platform as increasingly ‘unnecessary’.

He said: "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 PCs. 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 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

"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 creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."
Jobs says that Adobe’s push towards multiplatform doesn’t vie with Apple’s desire to have programmers write directly for its devices.

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