This is probably the most reasonable commentary on the topic of Adobe Flash Player’s absence from Apple’s iPhone. Since the day the iPhone was announced I have fielded questions on this topic in almost every single presentation that I have given. No exaggeration. 

I still can’t provide any “insider information” even though I’m no longer with the company (and I don’t really have any anyways – seriously). But the reasoning that Wired’s Brian X. Chen provides is exactly what I would suggest in conversation.

[...] Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash has evolved from being a mere animation player into a multimedia platform capable of running applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store.

I first heard this idea while at Microsoft’s MIX ‘08 conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer was asked (probably in jest) whether the iPhone would ever support Silverlight. Balmer snickered and then proceeded to explain that Apple’s (then recent) announcement of the iPhone SDK and marketplace was a signal that they intend to completely control the marketplace and developer platform for iPhone apps. If I recall correctly, he said something to the effect of, “Apple isn’t interested in open development for the iPhone.” I’m sure Apple would counter that Safari-based apps count as “open development” but, well, you make the call on that one.

In my opinion, Apple’s model for iPhone app development is pretty smart. Before the iPhone the number of Cocoa/Objective-C developers was probably pretty small. I’d bet they’ve seen a HUGE increase in registered developers since the release of the SDK (I’m one of them, and I know my friend Mesh is as well). And I think Apple is one of the only tech companies that could pull this off. But I don’t know if they can sustain their tight grip on iPhone development for long.

Now, that said, I still think there’s a chance that Flash will make it’s way onto the iPhone. It would most likely be as a Safari plugin so users could actually browse “the real Internet” as Apple likes to say in their ads. In his recent keynote at Adobe’s MAX user conference in San Francisco, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch had much to say about Flash on mobile devices, including bringing Google Android creator Andy Rubin up on stage to talk about Flash running on Google’s new device OS. I think market pressures – more than anything – will force Apple to embrace Flash at some point.

Check out this new iPhone JavaScript library, iUI, by Joe Hewitt. The team at Digg has already put this into practice, releasing a beta of an iPhone-optimized version of digg.com. You can view this at digg.com/iphone. If you don’t have an iPhone but want to get a virtual iPhone browsing experience, download iPhoney (mac only).

iUI is about more than just visuals, it aims to make web apps as usable as Apple’s own. One usability problem I kept witnessing in early iPhone web apps was a lack of support for the back button. While using these apps I often found myself hitting back and being sent two or three “pages” backwards. The reason is that most apps are using single-page navigation, which skirts the browser’s own history. The single-page model is the right way to go, but it is imperative that the back button still works, because if I’m going to wait 3 minutes to load a page over EDGE and then have to load it again because the back button accidentally sent me away from your site, I’m not going to be happy.

That’s why I think the best feature of iUI is that it makes single-page navigation usable. It keeps the back and forward buttons working and optionally inserts a captioned back button into your app’s toolbar. It slides smoothly between pages (at least as smoothly as Safari can go, which is about 1/10th as smooth as native apps) instead of the unpleasant flicker and jumpiness that accompanies a fresh page load.