Metamorphic Web Design

I've talked with a few people recently about recent moves by Apple, and especially about the recent change to Apple's terms and conditions that blocks Adobe from compiling iPhone apps from Flash. Jason Snell has some excellent commentary at Macworld.

Apple doesn’t want apps that don’t feel like native iPhone apps on the iPhone. It doesn’t want Adobe to aid developers in creating a world where App X for iPhone and App X for Android are indistinguishable from one another. Apple doesn’t want to introduce new iPhone features and then watch as nobody takes advantage of them because Adobe hasn’t updated its development system yet. Or, worse, watches as Adobe refuses to adopt them because the other operating systems don’t support those features.

From a systems perspective, the iPhone is pretty straightforward. If you make a bullet-point list of features it doesn't seem that different from any of a number of other smartphones on the market. In fact, many pile on features that the iPhone doesn't have. On a feature-by-feature comparison, the iPhone shouldn't be dominating the market. But Apple isn't competing on quantity of features, they're shooting for quality of experience, and it's working for them. It's crucial to their business model that they never become a commodity hardware manufacturer.

But Adobe's approach would treat the iPhone as exactly that: one among a number of smartphones on which Flash can be deployed. If Adobe were successful at this, and a significant proportion of iPhone apps were cross-platform, they'd reduce the iPhone to a set of bullet-point features. Even worse, control of that list would rest with Adobe, not Apple. Apple's ability to provide a unique product would be undercut by Adobe's insistence that they support the same bunch of features everybody else does.

This isn't a theoretical situation for Apple – they've had these battles with Adobe on the Mac. Designers and other creative professionals are a significant proportion of Mac buyers, and many of them spend all their time working in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash. They're great programs, but they're also available for Windows, and Adobe doesn't have a great history of respecting Apple's user interface guidelines. When Apple introduces new ideas in Mac OS, they have to wait and see whether Adobe will support them or go their own way. The last thing they want is to give Adobe the kind of influence over the iPhone that they have over the Mac.