The Next Organization

Adobe's tough position toward Apple over iPhone's Flash support issue

For Adobe Systems, mobile phone is a critical field the company needs to cover in pursuing its user interaction platform strategy. Being able to support iPhone (given the phone's dominantly popularity) is therefore important at this moment. However, Apple is of course not so hasty about helping Adobe to make this happens. 

Greed clashed, Adobe in its Adobe Systems' MAX developer's conference early October 2009, has demonstrated its tough position toward Apple. The keynote addresses included Adobe's plans to bring the Flash Player to most of the major smartphone platforms, i.e. RIM, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Google's Android, and Palm's webOS. Apple's iPhone was absent from the list. In other words, Adobe left the matter of supporting Flash on iPhone Safari browser to Apple.

According to Rich Tretola of Everything Flex blog Adobe had to create a way to allow for applications built on the Flash Player to act as native iPhone applications. This was only possible by actually embedding the Flash Player within the application and then submitting the whole thing for approval to Apple just as any other application that goes to Apple for approval. 

And here is another interesting fact worthy to note. Adobe recently changed the message iPhone users receive when they go to Adobe's web page to install Flash. The text now states: “Flash Player not available for your device. Apple restricts use of technologies required by products like Flash Player. Until Apple eliminates these restrictions, Adobe cannot provide Flash Player for the iPhone or iPod Touch.”

The bottom line is, if one wants to develop Flash for mobile phones, application may well be one's only choice when it comes to iPhone. Web pages with Flash contents will continue to look ugly on iPhone for quite some time.

Profiling US mobile Internet users and projecting Vietnamese peers (Part 1)

In this post, I synthesize the research data related to US and sometimes worldwide mobile Internet, "wired" Internet and smartphone users, to depict a profile of US mobile Internet users. Using the underlying factors and data about mobile Internet and mobile phone market in Vietnam, the second part of the post will project characteristics of Vietnamese mobile Internet users.

Now, let's start with US mobile Internet user profile:

• Gender: more male than female
• Income: widely distributed (high income is not a differentiating factor)
• Lifestyle: more active people, less heavy internet users
• Content consumed: News and social network
• Phone: Still many "dummy" phone and increasingly smartphones; large and extra large screens; and mainly with iPhoneOS, Android and Symbian OS

Gender: more male than female

According to The Nielsen Company, worldwide mobile Internet users are slightly more likely male than female. The male bias of mobile Internet use is consistent across markets and is most pronounced in European markets. In Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well, males are more likely than females to browse the mobile Internet.

This gender bias, can be explained by:

• (Nielsen) Gender bias of traditional "wired" Internet users
• (My explanation) Higher ratio of public-transported commuting males explains the higher difference in European countries, where public transportation is very popular (my interpretation)
• (My explanation) More mobile Internet contents geared toward male than female, e.g. news, sports, tech, traditionally. Increasing popularity of social networking services like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, where there are more female than male, probably is the main driver of a 9% higher growth rate (between 2008 - 2009) of female vs. male mobile Internet users.

Income: high income is not a differentiating factor

Also, according to Nielsen (2008), the US mobile Internet audience is not, as some expect, overly concentrated in high-income households:

• 24% of all mobile Internet users have household incomes of $100,000 or more
• 26% of all mobile Internet users have a household income of under $50,000

This I think is caused mainly by low barrier of entry. US mobile providers' flat-rate mobile data programs with affordable price. These programs often also bundle voice, which make them more attractive even to medium-end phone users.

Lifestyle: more active people, less heavy internet users