This has bothered me since the day Apple started throwing around their anti-Flash, pro-HTML5 rhetoric.

Today, as things stand, there is NO open substitute for Flash on Apple’s mobile devices (iPod, iPad, iPhone). The alternative is the equally closed iPhone OS platform.

Trading the Flash platform for the iPhone OS platform is the SAME DIFFERENCE. Pushing HTML5 video is a cop-out and a smoke screen.

Just look at all the site-specific apps on the App Store. Apple promotes the ABC, Netflix, WSJ, etc apps as benefits. I see the opposite - content providers being locked into yet another proprietary technology. How do sites being forced to serve their content via “apps” good for the “open web”? At least Flash is cross-platform (in the “it mostly works” sense).

That’s not to say I want Apple to support Flash on their devices. I’d much prefer Apple lived up to their marketing-speak and push HTML5 and deliver on the phoney PR promise of an open alternative to Flash. There are several young open HTML5 technologies including WebGL and Canvas that have the potential to provide a complete, open replacement for Flash.

Canvas is supported in varying degrees today by Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, but the problem hindering each is miserable performance.

Unfortunately, Apple will not be the one to lead the charge for HTML5. They have no motivation to see Canvas and WebGL mature to the point where they can replace Flash because that would mean less content for their tightly controlled App Store.

Apple criticising Flash for being closed is hypocritical and two-faced.