We developed ChoiceBot widgets as Adobe Flash objects for a number of technical reasons that I won't go into. So far, this has definitely been a good decision since it's part of the reason why ChoiceBots perform well, contain all those helpful little effects and animations, and why it looks and runs the same on any browser on any operating system.
Except the iPhone. There's been a lot of speculation as to why Apple didn't include support for Flash in iPhone 2.0, since it's been one of the major gripes users have had since the day the original iPhone hit the market. Apple's official excuse has been that the Flash player is "too bloated" (i.e., uses too much memory and/or CPU power), but no-one seems to really believe that based on the device's powerful ARM processor and ample memory.
Maybe they just didn't have time to get it in there. That, I'm more inclined to believe.
I wonder, however, if the real reason isn't that Apple is worried about cannibalizing its App Store business. Most of the App Store apps that I've seen could have easily been developed in Flash, and a number of them were Flash applications before being ported to the iPhone. Once Flash is supported, the thousands of visually-rich applications in the App Store is going to be instantly dwarfed by the millions that have already been built in Flash, and that are freely available on the wild, wild Internet.
Apple's resistance to Flash starts to make sense when you consider that nearly all Flash applications are free, whereas many of the App Store apps aren't. And Apple gets 30% of every paid app that gets sold on the App Store. Hmmm...
Having access to ChoiceBots on a mobile device would be absolutely killer, because you could see your rankings, product pros and cons, etc. while you're in a store. I've personally experienced the need for this many times already. Let's hope Apple does the right thing and puts its users ahead of a cash grab that can't possibly last very long anyway.
UPDATE: Apple was just forced to pull a TV ad that claimed that the iPhone enables users to access "all of the Internet". People complained that Flash- and Java-enabled sites are a big part of the Internet, and that Apple's claim therefore constituted false advertising.
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