A Letter to Steve Jobs
The following is a letter I've sent to Mr. Jobs concerning Flash & AIR on the iPhone & iPad:
Dear Steve,
I agree with you... apps and content need to run well on mobiles, and they need to be developed with quality and performance in mind. With that said, I think you are possibly misplacing your blame. Tools aren't the problem, developers are! I don't have a problem with Apple curating the App Store, but by forcing developers to use only one set of tools, I must respectfully disagree. This should be the developer's choice.I think you are missing a huge opportunity here to increase your company's revenue. This little demo proves Flash content can run really well on mobiles devices that are comparable to your iPhone & iPad if done properly.
I believe the real issue that you aren't taking into consideration is that whether an app is built with Flash, Java or even Objective-C; they can still crash. I've seen it with my own eyes with apps on my iPhone and iPad. The quality of the app is up to the developers to ensure that their app is optimized and bug-free. It is not right to blame the tools when the developer built a bloated, buggy app that crashes. That blame should fall solely on that developer for not having a mastery of his tools. Plus, there are still a large number of iPhone apps built with Adobe's AIR iPhone Packager currently in the iTunes Store, of which that majority of them function just as well as Objective-C coded iPhone apps.
BTW... I still have one app, TheProducer, that has been locked eternally "In Review" since March 15, would you at least either approve or deny it. We would like to move forward building apps for the iPhone and iPad with Flash CS5, so that we can educate people of all ages, around the world on how they can create quality media with tools such as the iPhone 4.
I ask that you at least reconsider Apple's stand on this. You could increase your enterprise and gaming developer community significantly by accepting ActionScript developers.Warmest Regards,
Lee Graham
