People love to complain, and we think half of it is due to laziness. Or incompetence. And with the iPhone, it’s no different. Take MMS for example: thousands claimed it was silly for the iPhone not to support it, but we disagreed. MMS is an outdated technology for which there are plenty of modern-day solutions, ranging from e-mail to Twitter. To rely on yet another protocol for sharing multimedia, when more reliable solutions exist, is nonsense. With rock-solid Twitter integration thanks to the dozens of Twitter apps on the AppStore, we barely find a need for SMS anymore, let alone it’s bigger cousin. Never mind the fact that e-mail works just as well for sharing multimedia.
But then there’s Flash, arguments for which are even more ridiculous. Who needs Flash on their iPhone? Yes, some sites aren’t non-Flash friendly, and therefore can’t be browsed via Mobile Safari, but that’s less Apple’s fault, and more the fault of web developers who decide to use Flash instead of other, more accepted (and open) technologies. It’s not like Flash was always viewable from every browser anyway, so why do people argue that the iPhone should suddenly adopt Flash as a sort of multimedia standard? Even dismissing arguments about how Flash is burdensome on one’s CPU and battery, there remains the obvious distaste for a third-party plugin that’s not friendly to industry-wide standards.
What Flash is, is a luxury. A luxury you get to have if you’re on a system not constrained by smaller processors and batteries. A luxury you get when you don’t care about a common user interface for your apps, because you’re not using a heavily-integrated phone-computer. And that luxury is not a right just because a bunch of lazy developers refuse to use more modern technologies to reproduce the output of a commercial Adobe product.
What people should be complaining about is not that the iPhone doesn’t support Flash, but that some sites are developed in Flash in the first place.
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