Flash is verboten on the iPhone OS for the same reason that saving MP3s is verboten. So Apple can placate content owners and maintain the viability of its iTunes business.

According to the developer community, Apple doesn’t support Flash inside Safari on the iPhone because, among other reasons, Flash is a processor hog (and thus battery drain). I believe that Flash has limited support on other smartphones as well.

“Apple is the leading retailer of music in the United States. Why should it enable competition in a business where it has no peers and on a platform it has no reason to cede?”

I disagree this is a motivation for Apple. They have allowed Rhapsody, Last.fm, and Pandora to make apps on the iPhone. They clearly aren’t worried about streaming music through flash since people are already streaming it through apps.

I think the biggest reason is they want to push the use of html 5 so people start using Quicktime for video delivery instead of Flash.

This is incorrect. As noted in a previous post, there’s multiple problems with Flash that could preclude its use on a mobile platform:

- Security problems
- Stability problems
- Power consumption

Taken separately, it is possible that one of these would be considered an acceptable issue: after all, the iPhone 3G presented consumers with a faster processor at the cost of battery life (since remedied, partially, in the 3GS.) However, together they form a pretty significant roadblock to widespread adoption of Flash on a mobile platform.

The security issue is perhaps the most salient, as Apple cannot hope to screen websites for malicious Flash content and thus is forced to rely on a third-party company for updates to protect against user-generated content. On the desktop, users have other tools to avoid malicious content, but this is not necessarily the case for mobile devices. As such, the iPhone developer agreement does not allow the use of emulators, and Flash certainly qualifies. As anyone who waited for a native OS X version of Photoshop knows, Adobe rarely moves fast, so it is unlikely Apple would opt to depend on Adobe’s good behavior where its security reputation is concerned.

To address the option of a “stripped-down” version, this is unlikely for compatibility reasons. For a simple comparison, note the experience of web browsing on an early BlackBerry product: in simplifying the content by restricting what did and did not work on the mobile device, it caused users to simply not use the feature. In practice, the problem of incompatibility (which is a given, no matter how limited the plugin would be) would cause more negative than positive experiences. We all know which ones get more press!

Finally, one of the other arguments against having Flash on a mobile computer is the simplified forms of supported input. Given that the iPad does not (currently) support secondary input devices, a user is necessarily limited to only the “click” action. Many, if not most, Flash movies rely heavily on mouseover, mouseout, and other events to function correctly — and there is no elegant way to translate these events when one’s only tool is a human finger.

As devices running the iPhone OS such as the iPad become peoples’ primary computer for browsing, they will need Flash to deliver on the promise of offering “the best web experience [they've] ever had.” The truth is, Flash is needed to browse the WHOLE web. In a survey of 3.5 million pages, the Opera (browser) developer center found that “somewhere between 30% and 40% of all pages tested contained Flash files.” That number soars to nearly 85% when only the “top sites” were surveyed, according to the Adobe CTO.

Yes, I understand the current iPhone Developers’ TOS prohibit the use of Flash but that is because it is evolved to be a multimedia platform that can run a myriad of applications in and of itself. Thus it would divert business from the App Store and iTunes Store, as you keenly asserted in your post. However, if there was a stripped version of Flash that didn’t so dramatically undercut Apple’s control of the software, then it may (and will) become a reality for hardware running the iPhone OS.