I don’t care at all about Flash specifically. Just because I know how to code in AS3 doesn’t mean that I depend on that specific knowledge or delude myself that the language will or should last forever. I could switch to making online experiences with JavaScript relatively painlessly – but I know it would be like going back to the AS2 world of three years ago when I would have to come up with janky workarounds to build a vision, and that I would feel the pain of what is and isn’t possible with the technology. I don’t think designers should conform ideas to available tools, I think that the tools should enable any vision a designer has. It allows design ideas to fail when they are bad, but it enables great ideas to be different enough to influence future UI design. Flash isn’t perfect, but it’s the closest the Internet has to a technology that enables a real immersive multimedia experience.

So, the reason this argument is happening now is that mobile touchscreen computers are becoming a major device category. The standard interactions, gestures, and capabilities of these devices isn’t fully defined yet and, as such, Flash has only just built in multitouch event listeners into it’s player. I too think Adobe should have been all over this a couple years ago, but corporations are often slow and resistant to changes, for some reason.

THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART:

Since Flash hasn’t prepared itself, from a technical standpoint, to smoothly move from desktop to mobile device input paradigms and processor restrictions, Apple is sensing an opportunity to severely weaken a major enemy to device/application differentiation. Other phone makers are finally catching up in terms of hardware and interaction paradigms, so software will be where the battle happens with these next gen portable devices. Apple does make their money on hardware, but it is their software that has always provided differentiation. The software is the reason I’ve always appreciated Mac devices. Since the iPhone user experience is basically a desktop with a bunch of apps on it, a continued differentiation of these apps IS the only play that keeps Apple apart from the competition. If app developers were allowed a powerful app creation platform that was device independent, it wouldn’t really matter which phone you got, as long as the device had the hardware specs you wanted. This is where we’ve come to in desktops and laptops, and Apple wants to hold onto their head start in mobile devices for as long as possible.

All I am looking for is a device-independent application creation platform that allows me to design and build experiences as powerful and compelling to the user as any walled-garden development platform out there, including Apple’s. Flash has shown us that this is possible in the desktop world, and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t possible in the mobile device world as well. These don’t have to be “McExperiences”, as you say. Instead, you could think of them as having access to your Mom’s awesome cooking anywhere you go. Cloud computing is exciting to people BECAUSE not DESPITE of the fact that it allows experiences to exist across platforms and devices.

Secondly, you’re very mistaken in regards to Apple and its revenue sources/streams. Apple has its iTunes ecosystem, yes — But if it were such a zealous content guardian, why then are there hundreds, if not thousands, of iPhone apps that deliver video, audio, subscription-based information, ad-supported free information, and even ad-supported network TV (have you seen ABC’s iPad app??) outside of the iTunes ecosystem?

The fact is and always has been that Apple’s profit model is centered around hardware sales. iTunes revenue is a nice bit of icing, and no doubt Apple is doing a lot to try to enhance revenues from iTunes and the App Store, and get a cut of ad revenues via iAd, but they’re not actively doing anything to block developers from generating revenue within their apps, even with advertising, completely outside of Apple’s mechanisms.

Third, talking about how Flash delivers to ‘all the available platforms’ basically means desktop OSes. Plugins in the browsers on Mac and Windows, AIR apps on Mac and Windows, and to a very very small degree, Linux. There simply is no shipping Flash player for Android, WebOS, Windows Mobile or BlackBerry yet, and we have yet to see how well it will perform once it ships (if they actually manage to get it out in 2010).

And that brings me to point #4 – performance. If Adobe had really, diligently worked to make Flash (including AIR) work as efficiently and reliably as possible on Mac OS X, this might not be such a big issue. The fact is, as even you must admit, the Flash plugin has become a top annoyance of Mac users, being far and away the number one source of browser crashes. Worse, it introduces security issues as Symantec noted. AIR apps don’t really fare much better.

So what value-add does Apple get out of allowing Flash (or Flash libraries, for the apps that can supposedly be compiled to ‘native’ iPhone OS) onto its platform? What killer application exists only in Flash that everyone simply HAS to use? The answer in both cases is none — or less than none, because Apple doesn’t want to introduce potential single points of failure (that are out of their control) to devices that are intended to be as ‘appliance-like’ as possible – so they’re avoiding multiple negatives.

To me, it seems like a lot of the arguments Flash defenders put forth boil down to the psychology of previous investment; they’re reluctant about having to learn either native iPhone coding or modern standards-compliant web app development, so as to create experiences that represent the best of what a native platform has to offer, instead of offering a “McExperience” that is the same everywhere you go.