Competing with the iPhone through Flash

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Scoble is at Nokia World talking about some new fangled device that we’ll hear about on Wednesday. These were the paragraphs that got me:

But engineering does NOT equal a great experience. Yeah, my Nokia does not drop phone calls in places in Silicon Valley that my iPhone does, but generally I reach for the iPhone when I want to make a call or surf the web. Why?

Nokia is behind in experience. The executives here from Nokia that I’ve talked to know that. They know this is Nokia’s touchiest week and one where they either deliver a much better device or they are going to face a very tough 2009 globally.

I’m clearly biased, but this is an industry that needs Flash. The user experience of the traditional players is so far behind the iPhone that it isn’t funny. And the iPhone is a perfect example of how important nailing the experience is – people buy based on that. Nokia has great hardware but the software experience needs to be better. That’s where Flash can bring them back to par with the iPhone and enable the same kind of developer ecosystem – if not larger – than the one Apple has created with the app store. The millions and millions of Flash developers could start building apps.

We’re working on this from a runtime perspective, and it’s starting to come together. And Nokia is a member of the Open Screen Project, so they’re clearly interested. Things are happening, but the huge potential continues to get me excited. And I want customers to start demanding Flash on more phones as a counterweight to the huge UX lead that Apple has.

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  3. The iPhone Helps Prove why RIAs are Important
  4. Odds Apollo Can Run on the new iPhone? I’d Say Pretty Good
  5. Using iPhone Apps as AIR Applications
  • http://www.barefootmobile.com/blogs/blinky Emanuele Cipolloni

    Hi Ryan,
    I’m not sure I understood your post, you’re basically saying that Nokia needs Flash in order to compete with the iPhone in terms of experience? But, if I’n not wrong, Nokia has been shipping Flash enabled devices since 2003, I don’t see how this can change (or keep changing) the things at all. How Flash would change the experience? Just for one, the input model of Flash do not even support multitouch, which is one of the key point of iPhone intuitive interface. In all honestly if you affirm “That’s where Flash can bring them back to par with the iPhone and enable the same kind of developer ecosystem” you probably have tried Flash but not iPhone SDK, they are not comparable at any level.

  • Ola Muldal

    Mobiles need the full Flashplayer, not Flash Lite. I’m not sure if that is what Ryan meant, but if we got preinstalled support for the Flashplayer (swf/AIR) on mobiles, development would explode.

    The question has always been if the browsers can handle the current flashcontent out there without totally cripple the performance. However, that is not the point.

    Watching the latest groundbreaking websites with 3D and movie effects is pointless on a mobile phone. Also is most of the AIR applications. But developing applications and webpages specifically for the mobile is perfectly doable with flash, and has been for years. I have an old Q-Tek with FP7, which runs lightweight flash applications with no problems at all – and that mobile is at least 4 years old.

    If I could just use my existing Flash/AS3 skills for creating mobile applications, and not worry about the difficult install routines on the phones, I would probably have created lots of apps already. I tried once with FL, but it was just too much mess to bother with.

  • Daniele

    Perfectly agree with Ola Muldal.
    Also, right now if you want to develop for mobile and address a wide market you are still stuck with older version of flash lite. Basically we have the toys, but we cannot make anything profitable with them

  • JulesLt

    The plus side, as you say, is that it would open development up to millions of Flash developers.

    Even if only a small percentage of them are (as I suspect) actually good at UX design, that small percentage is still large. The other question is how many good UX developers can scale their skills out to become good application developers. The number of Flash based applications out there that really rock is fairly small (smaller, probably, than the number of great Windows or OS X native apps).

    Historically, it seems to me that the main problem with software development equation has been people underestimating the importance of stuff they’re not interested in.

    The key questions are :

    1) Can Adobe do it? Given that the OS X and Linux versions of Flash lag behind Windows on the desktop, there’s obviously a lot of work to be done in terms of optimisation, before we even consider similar systems running on mobiles.

    2) Will the networks allow it? The preferred strategy for the networks is that THEY control the app store, not the manufacturer. A Flash/Air type solution means that neither do.

    3) Language support – my biggest dislike of all types of web development is that there is only one programming language available – the different dialects of ECMAScript. Silverlight is interesting in that respect, in introducing alternatives, and looking at the direction being taken by Microsoft, Apple and Java, it looks like they are all aiming towards a common low-level VM / runtime.

    Alchemy is obviously a step in that direction for Adobe (as I understand, reusing the same LLVM project Apple are placing a significant bet on).

    (Of course the key difference in platforms is understanding the standard libraries and APIs, but that is vocabulary, rather than syntax – you need to master both to be effective in a language).

  • http://johnwilker.com John Wilker

    Funny, I wasn’t talking about a Flash point of View but just blogged about the N95, being the suck, UX wise compared to the iPhone. Flash or not (The iPhone is pretty dope without it) Nokia needs to get a UX person that can compete. i Phone does less but rocks more. go figure.

  • http://www.afhill.com/blog Andrea Hill

    Does mobile need flash? For those of us starting to use our phones like mini-computers, yes. But perhaps the model is off. There is some research that states that mobile users tend to ‘search’ rather than ‘browse’, so are RIA experiences really appropriate for those user needs?

    Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing worse than trying to get information from a site on my iPhone and having it unavailable b/c it’s within a flash experience. But is that truly the most important advancement we need? If mobile is more than just “a different type of computer”, should we not look at how to truly optimize that experience, as opposed to simply replicating what we have elsewhere?