Jobs Cracks Whip at Adobe - Delays iPhone SDK

At an Apple shareholder’s meeting on Tuesday, Steve Jobs unleashed a stinging jab at longtime ally Adobe. Known for his quirky temperament that can build or crush whole businesses with a few words, Jobs said Flash runs too slow on the iPhone to be useful.

Adobe Flash has become the de facto standard in multimedia on the web and its absence is a serious issue for iPhone users. Lack of Flash is a considerable loss to the iPhone’s web experience and it has never been supported by the iPhone’s browser. If Apple won’t support it directly, developers hope to use the upcoming Software Development Kit (SDK) to make iPhone support Flash. But Jobs has made it clear that Adobe’s Flash just doesn’t measure up and it looks like the SDK will have to wait.

In the shareholder’s meeting Jobs criticized Flash’s two flavors, Flash Lite and Flash Player. He said that Flash Lite doesn’t go far enough and that the Flash Player, designed for laptops, is too slow and sluggish for the iPhone. He added that there’s a missing product in the middle.

There is no evidence that any middle product between Flash Lite and Flash Player is on the horizon. The comment is believed to be a general criticism of Adobe’s Flash product line.

Apple was expected to launch its iPhone SDK today but it’ll come as little surprise to most that it's been delayed. Apple is calling today’s town hall event a road map for iPhone SDK so it's release isn't expected to be part of the event's announcements. It’s believed that the finished SDK won’t make it into hands of developers until summer.