Comment by echelon
4 years ago
> The 30% cut was considered very good at the time. It was way better than the 50-90% cut that traditional publishers would take.
Why didn't Steve Jobs go with web distribution of first class web apps or allow Flash on his platform? If they truly wanted to be remarkable, this would have been the future.
The answer is control.
Apple is a cutthroat business just like any other, and their "privacy first" veneer is just a wolf in sheep's clothing. They're playing it up as an attack against Google and Facebook, meanwhile they still phone home about the apps you're running and can shut them off remotely.
Microsoft never taxed software on their platform. Jobs had to invent that business model. It flourished like wildflowers thanks to him.
'First class web apps' was precisely how you were supposed to create apps for the first iPhone; the SDK was thrown together over the next year only after the huge demand for writing native apps. The iPhone pushed a bunch of device access web APIs originally explicitly for this reason.
> Why didn't Steve Jobs go with web distribution of first class web apps
That was exactly his intent when he announced the iPhone, and he got absolutely obliterated by the internet for it.
*exactly what he claimed was his intent. There's no way Steve Jobs cared so little about quality he thought web apps were preferable.
Not allowing Flash on the iPhone is probably the best thing Apple ever did
Destroying an open, low barrier to entry animation and application platform that was used by teenagers to develop and share interactive content?
Destroying a way to deliver native-like, cross-platform applications without an app store was good?
Jobs did it for control. He didn't want interop between Android and iPhone, and he didn't want any web browser with enough flexibility to do anything sophisticated.
Flash was a dumpster fire of bad performance and security vulnerabilities. It was also a wholly proprietary platform that did great harm to the openness of the web during it's reign. It was only marginally less problematic than ActiveX.
Android had Flash. It stank, and the blame for its stinkiness lies entirely on Adobe.
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Flash was absolutely garbage on mobile at the time.
Signed, a heavy Windows Mobile user.