Hey, haven't you heard? It seems that Apple's new-fangled iPhone handset can't run content made for Adobe's Flash platform.

Wait, you mean this isn't news? This is something people have known about for three years? Well, you might want to tell that to the marketing team at Motorola. The Android handset maker has seen fit to point out that the iPhone still doesn't support Flash.

Snark aside, the ad raises an interesting point. With Flash 10.1 set to arrive on the Android platform, will Flash support become a selling point for Android and the handsets that run it?

Probably not.

The first point is the market. The people that buy an iPhone don't pick their phones based on a feature list. Those people bought other smartphones before and they're going to buy other handsets after. iPhone purchasers are buying the whole iPhone user experience. They buy into the iPhone interface, the App Store, iTunes and everything else that comes with it. If you're the type of person that buys a phone based on a feature list, you don't really go for all that stuff anyways.

The second point is the extent to which the lack of Flash hampers the iPhone. The idea is that because the iPhone doesn't run Flash, every site and service that relies on Flash can't run on the iPhone. With the App Store this is no longer the case. The big sites and services have long been building iPhone Apps that bring the service to iPhone users. Taking those out eliminates a lot of the Flash traffic out there that can't be accessed by way of the iPhone.

And of course there's the whole HTML5 thing, which threatens to replace or at least take a spot alongside Flash on much of the web.

No matter how you look at it, competitors taking shots at the iPhone for the lack of Flash are coming across as petty, jealous, and fairly ignorant about their own customer base.

04 Sep 2010