Wired has a nice article on why Adobe flash will never come to the iPhone, citing the license agreement and Apple’s unwillingness to allow any interpreter, other than its own, to run code on the iPhone. I guess there’s no hope for Java either.
I have my own theory why Flash won’t come to the iPhone. It’s because Apple knows Safari Mobile sucks when handling pages which require huge amounts of memory.
Yesterday, I found out about iTunes DRM when I wanted to sync my iPhone with iTunes. I decided to wipe off the jailbreak and restore from a clean slate. This morning, I Google-Reader’ed on the bus on the way to work.
The verdict? Reading Gizmodo feed on Google Reader mobile caused Safari to crash. Twice.
Ok, so I realised that jailbreaking doesn’t seem to have much effect on the crashes I encounter on Safari. But I did notice one thing. Google Reader on the iPhone isn’t your normal web interface. The whole page does not get refreshed, just the feeds within the page. (From this point on, I’m just hypothesizing. Correct me if I’m wrong.) Safari always seem to crash on me when opening image-heavy sites (some memory issue I presume). For example, I can’t seem to go to VR-Zone forums on the iPhone. Anyway, my theory is that for Google Reader, since the page never refreshes, each time I open a feed item, the memory used for the page itself increases, until I “mark all feeds as read” and they disappear or get replaced(I set it to show only new items). Thus, if I were to open a few image intensive feed items, somehow it gets overloaded attempting to show these feed items, even though they’re opened only one at a time.
Imagine if flash were ported to the Safari Mobile. Or java? Die! Both eats resources like no tomorrow!
In order not to reveal that the iPhone is actually just like Windows Mobile, aka. a crippled small brother of a much better OS, isn’t it much better to just not allow these things to be in there? After all, Apple users are snobs!
Maybe that’s why I can forgive the pitfalls Symbian OS readily. There’s no benchmark or a reputation to uphold against a more developed and powerful OS.
Now, can anybody lend me an Andriod OS smartphone, so I can get that off my chest too?
