Why Does Steve Jobs hate Flash?

If you read about Steve Jobs and Apple anywhere online in the past few weeks, you’ll know two things. One, if you find a device in a bar that looks like a future iPhone prototype, don’t take it and sell it to Gawker. Two, Steve Jobs really does not seem to like Flash.

By
Share this
  • Share this on Facebook
  • Share this on Twitter

If you read about Steve Jobs and Apple anywhere online in the past few weeks, you’ll know two things. One, if you find a device in a bar that looks like a future iPhone prototype, don’t take it and sell it to Gawker. Two, Steve Jobs really does not seem to like Flash.

Why is flash the bad guy? According to a story on NPR, Mr. Jobs probably generally does not like Flash because he thinks it’s a bad technology that just happens to be a standard for mobile content, video, and games on the Internet. It is the dominant multimedia technology in use now, but it is not good, in his mind. Or maybe, if Apple allowed flash on it’s iPhone and iPad devices, then there would be less value to purchase apps in the iTunes store (hmm…it’s a money thing, go figure).

The implications for casual games are staggering. Apple is creating the fastest growing devices (iPhone, iTouch, and iPad) for casual games and flash is the fastest growing language to creating casual games in (e.g., all your favorite Facebook games are built in flash).

You can read about and listen to NPR’s audio story about Apple and flash here.