The estrangement is complete: Let the messy divorce begin. Steve Jobs has gone public about his problems with Flash, the omnipresent web multimedia format which he will not allow on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Coming a little more than a week after Adobe said it would no longer try to get Flash onto Apple's suite of mobile internet devices, this looks like the definitive split. There's no chance of reconciliation, and the parties have moved from grumbling and sniping to publicly airing their grievances.

"Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice."In a rare blog posting on Apple's site, Jobs recounts a once cooperative relationship with Adobe, with Apple making visits to the then-startup's Silicon Valley garage. And he acknowledges that the companies have long had intertwined fortunes, sharing many customers and, at one time, equity.

But the new public remarks echo some he made in private at a recent Apple Town Hall meeting where he disparaged Adobe as "lazy." Now the Apple CEO says he has many technical and philosophical problems with Flash – six, to be precise – which would appear to make their differences irreconcilable.

"Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice," Jobs writes. "Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short."

The most difficult circle Jobs squares is the issue of open vs. proprietary: He acknowledges that Apple's products are closed but that devices and products are different than the web. "Apple has many proprietary products, too," Jobs writes. "Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript –- all open standards."

Of the notion that mobile Safari can't serve up "the full web," Jobs' answer is that an open video standard, H.264, is better, while not addressing the issue of adoption and critical mass. Tech history is littered with examples of better standards not becoming dominant.

Jobs dodges the issue with games, too: "Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world." Jobs does not indicate how many Flash-based games are available on the open web.

Similarly, Jobs knocks Flash for having security holes, taxing battery life and being out of step in a multitouch world. The latter defect he spins as an opportunity to go with open standards rather than updating Flash itself: "Apple’s revolutionary multitouch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?"

But the coup de grâce is his contention that a dependency on Adobe to keep pace with Apple platforms is fundamentally flawed. "We know from painful experience that letting a third-party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in substandard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform," Jobs writes. "We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers."

With this critical point Jobs addresses the contentious and until-now unexplained reason that the next development kit for the iPhone–iPod Touch–iPad product line, iPhone OS 4, will only allow apps to be written in native, approved coding languages such as C++ and Objective C, not cross-compilers which translate code from other languages into Apple-approved ones. That rules out, for example, content created with Adobe's Creative Suite.

"This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross-platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features," Jobs writes. "Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms."

Adobe has not yet responded to Wired's request for comment.

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