Mr Jobs, tear down this wall!

Watching the war between Apple and Adobe unfold is about as annoying as watching an older sibling pick on a younger one in the mall when the mom isn’t around (OK, sometimes that’s also funny, but usually it is upsetting).

I actually once defended Apple’s “garden wall” approach and its insistence on monitoring and gatekeeping the app store. There is so much crap out there and so may ways apps don’t work with hardware, it was nice to have someone filter everything and make sure it all works properly together.

But now Apple has gone too far. They banned a political cartoonist (although they appear to have reversed that decision) and now there is this ongoing battle with Adobe over Flash, which will hurt developers and end-users.

Flash is everywhere, it is well understood and while I’m not a programming, it seems to work well enough. Larger sites may be able to convert things to HTML5, smaller sites and developers will have a tough go trying to provide content on multiple platforms including the iThingy.

Apple does the community a service when it edits for interoperability and quality. It damages both the user experience and its own reputation when it edits for content or for narrowly-defined commercial purposes.

Let’s hope Android and the rumored Google tablet will be the tough type of competition that will force Apple to tear down this (garden) wall.