It has long been a dream of mine and many others that one day the web experience on your mobile is exactly the same as on your desktop. Albeit on a smaller screen.
Imagine going to youtube and watching videos with the same experience as the full website or yahoo mail with all its ajaxy bling and instant messenger built right in.
In many ways we’re almost there and I have to say Apple and the iphone deserve some credit. The experience is good but its not all there yet. Try going to youtube and playing a video … Oops you can’t. But why is it that with my nokia, windows mobile etc smartphone and the built in browser or Skyfire I can? Because my browser has an important plugin – called flash. Ubiquitous on the desktop but strangely missing on the iphone.
Right about now I hear the unified screams of the iphone fanboys yelling ‘but we have an app to do that!’ this is true but I am talking about convergence here. Parity. I as a developer doesn’t want to have to write a separate codebase for every mobile phone out there but because of the iphone’s popularity and lack of a key feature. I have to.
Adobe just announced flash 10 will be coming to pretty much every smartphone out there bar one the iphone. Why? Not because Adobe doesn’t want to provide it. They have gone so far as to actually having written Flash for the iphone already, it’s Apple and their typical closed door approach.
Apple, please open up your platform. You’re slowing down the future. Remember when you used to accuse Microsoft of doing the same. Stop the hypocrisy.
