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It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewrit

It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex) Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.

desireekdlo 9y ago
I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature. On the other hand, the demise of Flash seemed obvious in the long run, with all the other standards and alternatives that were developing, and problems with the platform that never seemed to be addressed well. It seems like there's been a number of pieces out there lately eulogizing Flash, and although I understand its appeal, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the idea that its demise was unanticipated. Even if Apple hadn't disabled Flash, the same outcome probably would have occurred. It just would have happened more gradually, with a more natural transition (which is important and why I have mixed feelings about all of this).
- dilap 9y ago
  Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right. Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had continued? (The one thing that doesn't hold up imo was the desire to not allow native apps using 3rd party intermediate APIs. Tons of apps are made that way now, and it's fine. Jobs' worry about hurting the platform because of the 3rd-parties not picking up the latest native APIs mostly hasn't come to pass, because iOS is so dominant that there's a strong competitive advantage/drive to quickly adopt new stuff. But it was probably a reasonable worry at the time.)
  - CaptSpify 9y ago
    That's the official reason. I've long suspected that the real reason he didn't want flash was because it would cut into app-store revenue.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      They weren't supporting Flash long before the App Store was a thing. I'm more inclined to believe that Adobe couldn't make a decently performant version of Flash for ARM that didn't eat battery power like a fat kid locked in a candy store.
      - CaptSpify 9y ago
        Yeah, but the app store was in the works by day one.
  - watty 9y ago
    Was Flash on Android bad? I guess I never really noticed. I imagine it performed worse but don't those things fix themselves over time? It's like OS X or Windows banning Electron Apps because they're horrible compared to native.
    - jrs95 9y ago
      > It's like OS X or Windows banning Electron Apps because they're horrible compared to native. Can they do this??! Please?! As for Flash on Android, it was pretty terrible iirc. But at least it worked, and with most of the video content still being Flash based at the time, it was kind of nice to have until everyone switched off of it within a year or two.
  - BatFastard 9y ago
    >Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. I have a bridge to sell you too! He took that position so that everything would be forced to go thru the app store. Flash apps can run on iOS right now, but they have to go thru the app store. People wrote a TON for flash games, most of it was shit, but some was amazing and creative. Much like what you see in the app store now.
- Someone 9y ago
  I disagree. The early iPhones had to be memory constrained to get reasonable battery life (CPUs can be switched off, but RAM eats power even when your phone is asleep). Supporting Flash would have resulted in a system running, effectively, multiple independent graphic subsystems, each with their own font and web cache. Users would have blamed the platform for the resulting performance problems. Also, Steve had seen what happened to OS/2. Once it supported Windows APIs, as good as nobody wrote OS/2 applications anymore, killing the platform. With zillions of Flash games out there, the same would have happened to iOS.
baldfat 9y ago
That is why Haxe and OpenFl are getting so much attention and using flash develop. http://www.flashdevelop.org/ http://www.flashdevelop.org/ It basically just an open source alternative to Flash at this point.
thebouv 9y ago
I really, really liked Flex. I built several iPad and iPhone apps with it back in the day as it was just so much more accessible than XCode and Objective-C. To this day I still say it was my favorite environment and language to build in (AS3).
- mmauri 9y ago
  We had a quite large Flex AS3 Business analytics Flash App (100K LoC). We had to rewrite it to get away from Flash plugin and because of Haxe+HaxeUI+OpenFL we saved literally 1 year of development+testing. Haxe also allows us to maintain and improve a web + native app with a single code base with a very small team. Compilation errors and strict typing IMHO is a must for your own peace of mind, when you are dealing with a big code base. I could say Haxe and its ecosystem has saved our company from dying along with flash plugin.
ralmidani 9y ago
I generally do not like Steve Jobs (at least as a business person), but killing Flash was the right thing to do, regardless of whether he did it for the right reason.
pier25 9y ago
I was a Flash dev for a decade and I'm not sure I agree with you. On one hand AS3 was a much better language 10 years ago than JS is today. But OTOH when I was doing UIs in Flash I always missed HTML and CSS. The good thing about Flash is that you could make stuff that was impossible otherwise, but once HTML5 was here why chose Flash? It was slow and a battery hog. Steve Jobs didn't kill Flash, it died under its own weight or probably Adobe let it die. Maybe Adobe thought investing in AS4 didn't make sense considering everyone was moving to HTML5.

desireekdlo 9y ago

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature. On the other hand, the demise of Flash seemed obvious in the long run, with all the other standards and alternatives that were developing, and problems with the platform that never seemed to be addressed well. It seems like there's been a number of pieces out there lately eulogizing Flash, and although I understand its appeal, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the idea that its demise was unanticipated. Even if Apple hadn't disabled Flash, the same outcome probably would have occurred. It just would have happened more gradually, with a more natural transition (which is important and why I have mixed feelings about all of this).

dilap 9y ago
Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right. Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had continued? (The one thing that doesn't hold up imo was the desire to not allow native apps using 3rd party intermediate APIs. Tons of apps are made that way now, and it's fine. Jobs' worry about hurting the platform because of the 3rd-parties not picking up the latest native APIs mostly hasn't come to pass, because iOS is so dominant that there's a strong competitive advantage/drive to quickly adopt new stuff. But it was probably a reasonable worry at the time.)
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  That's the official reason. I've long suspected that the real reason he didn't want flash was because it would cut into app-store revenue.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    They weren't supporting Flash long before the App Store was a thing. I'm more inclined to believe that Adobe couldn't make a decently performant version of Flash for ARM that didn't eat battery power like a fat kid locked in a candy store.
    - CaptSpify 9y ago
      Yeah, but the app store was in the works by day one.
- watty 9y ago
  Was Flash on Android bad? I guess I never really noticed. I imagine it performed worse but don't those things fix themselves over time? It's like OS X or Windows banning Electron Apps because they're horrible compared to native.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    > It's like OS X or Windows banning Electron Apps because they're horrible compared to native. Can they do this??! Please?! As for Flash on Android, it was pretty terrible iirc. But at least it worked, and with most of the video content still being Flash based at the time, it was kind of nice to have until everyone switched off of it within a year or two.
- BatFastard 9y ago
  >Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. I have a bridge to sell you too! He took that position so that everything would be forced to go thru the app store. Flash apps can run on iOS right now, but they have to go thru the app store. People wrote a TON for flash games, most of it was shit, but some was amazing and creative. Much like what you see in the app store now.
Someone 9y ago
I disagree. The early iPhones had to be memory constrained to get reasonable battery life (CPUs can be switched off, but RAM eats power even when your phone is asleep). Supporting Flash would have resulted in a system running, effectively, multiple independent graphic subsystems, each with their own font and web cache. Users would have blamed the platform for the resulting performance problems. Also, Steve had seen what happened to OS/2. Once it supported Windows APIs, as good as nobody wrote OS/2 applications anymore, killing the platform. With zillions of Flash games out there, the same would have happened to iOS.

baldfat 9y ago

That is why Haxe and OpenFl are getting so much attention and using flash develop. http://www.flashdevelop.org/ http://www.flashdevelop.org/ It basically just an open source alternative to Flash at this point.

thebouv 9y ago

I really, really liked Flex. I built several iPad and iPhone apps with it back in the day as it was just so much more accessible than XCode and Objective-C. To this day I still say it was my favorite environment and language to build in (AS3).

mmauri 9y ago
We had a quite large Flex AS3 Business analytics Flash App (100K LoC). We had to rewrite it to get away from Flash plugin and because of Haxe+HaxeUI+OpenFL we saved literally 1 year of development+testing. Haxe also allows us to maintain and improve a web + native app with a single code base with a very small team. Compilation errors and strict typing IMHO is a must for your own peace of mind, when you are dealing with a big code base. I could say Haxe and its ecosystem has saved our company from dying along with flash plugin.

ralmidani 9y ago

I generally do not like Steve Jobs (at least as a business person), but killing Flash was the right thing to do, regardless of whether he did it for the right reason.

pier25 9y ago

I was a Flash dev for a decade and I'm not sure I agree with you. On one hand AS3 was a much better language 10 years ago than JS is today. But OTOH when I was doing UIs in Flash I always missed HTML and CSS. The good thing about Flash is that you could make stuff that was impossible otherwise, but once HTML5 was here why chose Flash? It was slow and a battery hog. Steve Jobs didn't kill Flash, it died under its own weight or probably Adobe let it die. Maybe Adobe thought investing in AS4 didn't make sense considering everyone was moving to HTML5.