With the iPod and iPhone, Apple looked like world-beaters, and when the app store opened, developers flocked to pay Apple $100 for the privilege of downloading the app SDK; they began furiously pumping out apps and biting their fingernails while Apple’s team personally verified the worthiness of each app.  Okay, we get it: part of the iPhone experience is knowing that every app has been tested and approved; it’s quality control.

It seems that much of the debate right now is whether Flash is an open standard and/or whether apps written in objective C are open and/or which company is behaving like the biggest crybaby.  Really, neither is an open standard.  If you want to develop an iPhone app on a Windows machine or if you’re looking to compile some Actionscript without running Flash, you have to use third-party software in either case.  These companies are like two toddlers whining at one another for not wanting to share their toys.

Jobs does have some points – Flash is not the best for use in iPhone apps, and not just because adopting it for the app store would punish all of Apple’s loyal developer community, who plunked down dollars for the SDK.  Having developed in Flash, I’m willing to believe Apple’s claims about Flash’s memory issues (remember ye olde garbage collection issues?).  However, WebKit is the best mobile browser anyone has ever seen, and it doesn’t support Flash.  On this point, there seems to be no good rationale.

Let Apple keep Flash out of the app store.  That’s their bread and butter – okay.  But creating a mobile web browser that doesn’t support the plugin that’s installed on over 95% of desktop browsers – including safari – is just bitterness manifested.  Other mobile browsers support Flash, and yet Apple seems too content to let the market pass them by in this regard.

The worst part is that Jobs and his supporters are offering HTML5 as a panacea.  Sure, it’ll be great – whenever it’s fully supported – but its video component will lack much that Flash is able to do fairly easily now (real interactivity, for example), and its codec of choice, H.264, is proprietary.  Having most players agree on a proprietary format is not the same thing as an open standard.  Oh, and it leaves out Firefox, which is, by the way, open.   It’s like telling commuters that everything will be great when we get our hovercars that run on solar power.  In the meantime, your car is not welcome on our road.  Jobs and his backers may have a point that Adobe treated Apple like a second-class citizen back in the 90s.  Which they were.  Now, I love my Apple products like anyone else drinking the multimedia development koolaid, but wasn’t Adobe doing the same thing to Apple back then that Apple is trying to do to Adobe now?  If the open revolution proved anything, it’s that having a zen-like indifference to such petty squabbles produces winners.  Did Zend worry about Microsoft?

Jobs’ blog post hints at the decades of recrimination by recalling the early days when Adobe and Apple were both based in similar garages.  Get over it.  It’s Final Cut Pro and Aftereffects.  No one will ever use the combination of Premiere and Motion.  Flash is better for the web.  Mac apps are better for Apple devices.

It seems that offering Flash support in Apple’s mobile WebKit browser while keeping Adobe out of the app store market would make everyone relatively happy, but unfortunately, it seems such realism is lacking in the relatively closed and high-ego world of large-scale software development.

update: proof Flash can hang on Apple mobile devices after all?