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I don't know if everyone here is familiar with this, but the decline of Flash began or was greatly influenced by Apple's decision to not let flash run on iPhone

by htk 6y ago

I don't know if everyone here is familiar with this, but the decline of Flash began or was greatly influenced by Apple's decision to not let flash run on iPhones/iPads. Steve Jobs even wrote an open letter about it[1]. [1]https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

chc 6y ago
Yep. At the time, it was kind of a controversial decision. Now it seems obvious.
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  That Flash should be deprecated wasn't controversial (at least amongst tech savvy people). What was controversial was not supporting it at all, because doing so locked out a lot of the web of the time. Especially certain enterprise sites but also a lot of video sites or even ordering a taxi in some cases. That said, the iPhone was in a particularly unique position to push through a change like this and force websites to adapt. iPhones were becoming popular with upper management so a website that didn't work for them was actually considered an issue worth addressing. Nowadays Chrome would also have a good chance of forcing similar changes.
uhhyeahdude 6y ago
That is one of the more well-reasoned and thoroughly explained pieces of corporate communication I’ve read. I wonder if the “Jobs style” has been widely adopted in the corporate world; I feel like I see it more and more often these days.
cxr 6y ago
The other thing that was always notable about this letter is Jobs's own use of the term "PCs" to refer generically to a form factor (that would include Macs), and not the long-dead trademark for IBM's product line of home computers from the 1980s.
- DannyB2 6y ago
  Prior to the IBM PC, ironically, Steve Jobs had coined the term "personal" computer. Prior to this term, they were called "micro" computers "home brew", "toy", "small", etc. The idea of one man, one machine. A computer that is personal -- like a toothbrush is personal. It is irony that IBM used the term on its microcomputer.
akersten 6y ago
Would this be considered anti-competitive today? Let's say you control a major internet browser (or have good knowledge to believe that your iPhone's Safari will become a major internet browser) and specifically exclude support for a competitor's platform (forcing people to the App Store/Apple ecosystem to create similar experiences). On its face, and outside the technical considerations of Flash as a platform, it seems like a move to directly subsume a huge market share. I'm surprised this angle hasn't gotten more discussion. Personally, I think the bar for anti-trust in tech is very, very high and this doesn't meet it (and neither would current shenanigans du jour) but interested to hear what others think, or how they think it's different. It's kind of nuanced since it's more like one vendor not developing support for a competitor, rather than impeding them after-the-fact.
- clairity 6y ago
  it's clearly anti-competitive, then and now. whether it's an abuse of monopoly power or an anti-trust violation is open for debate (particularly, how you define markets for analytical purposes).
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    Given the high percentage of Android phones, there was no monopoly to abuse.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    They had legitimate cause to keep a bloated, buggy, resource hog off of iPhone 1. Adobe had plenty of time to clean up their act and never has.
  - simonh 6y ago
    Do you think companies should always be expected adopt and implement the proprietary products and technology of other companies in their products? That seems like an extremely broad expectation. For example cars nowadays have computerised entertainment systems. If your a car manufacturer and I bring out a service for use in cars with a free client app, should I be able to sue you if you don't put my client app in your car and integrate it into your infotainment systems at no cost to me? If I bring out a new proprietary internet technology, should I be able to sue all the phone manufacturers that don't build in support for it into their phones at their own expense? I'm having difficulty seeing how this ability for companies to unilaterally impose obligations on other companies, enforceable on anti-trust grounds is practical.
Scene_Cast2 6y ago
It also signaled the end of the golden era of amateur 2D games and drawn movies (i.e. what Newgrounds was famous for). I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content, unfortunately.
- amatecha 6y ago
  Yup, the advent of Flash animations was the one time that almost all of my friends and I were able to produce _some_ kind of animation. We all had silly little things we put on Newgrounds, when none of us (well, except me) had any prior animation experience. It was a pretty empowering experience and I remember the relative ease with which we could produce some pretty nice-looking stuff. Of course, that's about all I miss about Flash, but it was a really great time while it lasted. :)
- whywhywhywhy 6y ago
  Flash sucked for a lot of things but what it was an unsung hero for was actually being an outlet and onramp for adolescent creativity. Children online during that era were not just staring into YouTube videos served up by the algorithm they were clicking around Flash compilation sites with animations, games etc and many would eventually pirate a copy of Flash. The beauty of the tool, especially in the AS2 era was you could open it up and start animating straight away but then to add sounds or loops you had to add little bits of code into the timeline. This was a perfect way for many to start dabbling with and understanding coding.
  - detritus 6y ago
    'Adolescent' seems a bit dismissive, although I'm sure you didn't mean it that way. Flash opened up digital experience creation for a multitude of people of all ages - th emost interactively interesting web rode off the back of Flash for a good decade and more. Personally I never much liked Flash, and only resorted to it for things that were out of reach of my meagre capabilities, adding to HTML etc.
  - asdff 6y ago
    I think this is a little dismissive of kids today. How many kids actually bothered pirating a copy of Flash vs. just mindless playing bloons tower defense? You could argue that this low stakes gaming has been replaced by phone apps. But kids today are learning from what they watch on youtube: far more kids are making their own videos for their youtube channel or tiktok account and learning about av production in the process, than kids learning flash programming 15 years ago. Sure it starts small with your phone camera, but look at the production quality of some of these influencers: they are investing in good cameras, microphones, lighting, sound proofing, editing software, and that is something you need to learn a little bit about video production to effectively set up, and these are still marketable skills.
jimmaswell 6y ago
Flash didn't die a natural death, it was murdered by companies that resent any loss of control over their users. Complaints by Jobs weren't in good faith overall - Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day. Jobs was just a control freak along with wanting to keep games/interactive content in the walled-off app store (plain web capability wasn't there yet at the time), Google can't collect data from Flash content as easily and wants its developers more focused on advertising than supporting the ever-dwindling feature list of Chrome (who cares about features like extension capability or viewing flash content when we already captured a ton of users bundling the browser with random installers and we can advertise on the google home page), and Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does. We could still be in that brief utopia of new HTML5 capability coexisting with first-class Flash support if the politics played out differently.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does. I think Mozilla's incentives for minimizing Flash were relatively aligned with their principles: Flash is a proprietary technology from a single company, not an open standard. I also think that's a valid criticism, and why a lot of other tech enthusiasts didn't mind seeing Flash die, either. I largely agree with you though—Flash was a good technology, and the clear line in the sand it created between "web pages as documents" and "interactive content" had a lot of advantages. I also don't think it was any more bloated than modern HTML web apps, although it felt heavier at the time due to our more limited hardware capabilities.
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    Was NSAPI not an open standard?
    - narag 6y ago
      You mean NPAPI, right?
      - 6y ago
DannyB2 6y ago
Flash did not run on every possible platform that web browsers ran on. Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux. Flash needed to move aside so that the web standards could advance to the point where Flash was no longer necessary. Not only did Flash need to die, but all browser plug ins: Flash, Java Applets, ActiveX and Silverlight. Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do amazing things in them, confident that it works on any client without 3rd party extensions. Flash (and Applets, ActiveX) served a short term purpose. Silverlight was an attempt, too late, to capture Flash's success.
- erichocean 6y ago
  > confident that it works on any client LOL, I think you mean: on Chrome (and if we're lucky, Firefox).
  - acdha 6y ago
    I develop in Firefox and it’s pretty rare that I have to spend time on other browsers, which was not the case a decade ago. It’s also not like Flash was perfect at this: I ran into compatibility issues where something worked on Windows but not macOS or vice versa, and the frictional cost of having an unstable, primitive IDE was significant — especially since Adobe typically ignored bug reports until the next major release, at which point they’d tell you that you should drop $500 for the privilege of seeing whether they’d fixed it.
    - erichocean 6y ago
      Firefox => Chrome works pretty well. The other direction? Not so much…
      - gmanley 6y ago
        It really depends on what you are developing. If you are using cutting edge browser features. Things like WASM or new JS APIs, sure you'll likely run into incompatibilities. However, if you are building a pretty standard content website, not a single page app, from my experience, pretty much everything just works between browsers. This was definitely not the case 10 years ago. Especially when including IE in the mix.
cryptoz 6y ago
The decline of Flash did not begin with Steve Jobs. Maybe accelerated, but definitely not started. Flash was already long on its way out due to many of the reasons Jobs listed.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Essentially, the web migrated to the mobile format and Flash was extremely ill-prepared to make that jump, inside and out.
asciident 6y ago
I think that's rewriting history a bit. The decline certainly didn't begin with Apple's decision. Apple saw where things were headed, and jumped on (an early) bandwagon. Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. I hope in a few years people don't start saying that Apple killed Flash, as I remember specifically that was not what happened at that time.
- JimDabell 6y ago
  There was already a strong decline underway, but there were plenty of people who were convinced it would stick around. Apple's decision was the nail in the coffin.
- liquidise 6y ago
  As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube announcement in Jan 2010 of an experimental HTML5 video player. It took years for that player to become the standard. Apple may well have seen the writing on the wall, but to say "everyone hated or was avoiding flash" is objectively false.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    This comports well with my memory of the time. I remember there being a lot of "Flash sucks" sentiment online, but no decent alternatives. The days of entire UIs done in Flash was largely over by 2010, IIRC, but there were still things like video playback that couldn't be handled easily without Flash. I remember explicitly installing Flash on Linux, simply so I could watch Youtube with relatively little friction. In my mind, by that time, that was the main purpose of having Flash around at all. I am really glad HTML 5 has matured to the point that it has. Not having to have an entirely separate runtime environment running in the browser window makes things so much more stable than before. Now, if only we could figure out a way to make having lots of tabs not be painful, and maybe get a bit of a handle on memory usage, I think I might very well be out of things to complain about in terms of basic browser usability. ;)
    - 6y ago
eli 6y ago
That was a big deal at the time, but Flash was on the decline well before then and it was obvious where things were headed. You could technically run Flash on early Android phones, but it was horribly slow and barely functional. Too processor intensive, too hard to make responsive content, and that's on top of all the security and other concerns. Flash was never going to survive the shift to mobile. Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its demise, but not by much.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  > Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its demise, but not by much. To be fair, Apple's influence was far greater in the smart phone space than the PC space.
  - eli 6y ago
    You're right, but I really do think it was inevitable. Flash Lite just didn't run well on any of its supported platforms at the time, and the then-new technology "HTML5" had the advantage of being simpler and more open. The main thing Flash had going for it was the inertia from developers who already knew it. If you're interested here's a blogpost from Adobe's developer relations person at the time of Flash on Mobile's demise http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/ http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-o...
duxup 6y ago
IMO Flash was already languishing and Steve's criticisms were valid. It was a big deal when Steve made the call, but I'm not sure the call was a random act of Steve as much as, Flash was hardly in great shape. It was home to a lot of content you couldn't find elsewhere, but Apple not supporting flash didn't happen in a vacuum.
- robertoandred 6y ago
  On the contrary, people thought the iPhone not supporting Flash would make it a non-starter and give Android a huge leg up. Flash was viewed not as languishing but as a fundamental requirement.
  - duxup 6y ago
    Pundits being wrong doesn't really change the reality of the state of flash.
buboard 6y ago
Another sign of the tech regression is that we don't have a robust alternative that does the things Flash did. No easy-to-use and publish editor, no robust video/audio streaming server/client combo. Today's HTML alternatives are so convoluted and bad to integrate that we need to use proprietary/closed platforms (e.g. Unity, youtube) Apple never really loved the web. Web animation and gaming are still behind what you could very easily do with flash, webrtc+video are horrible battery drains etc. Ironic, considering that one of the reasons that Jobs bashed flash was that it drained the battery. And that he replaced "not open" flash games with his own Closed Platform and App Store garden. The whole reasoning in that letter reeks of hypocrisy , it should be obvious in retrospect. On top of that , modern "HTML sites" are much worse performance-wise than the equivalent flash. Abandon flash : sure, it's old and unsafe and nobody wants browser plugins. But make sure you have a decent alternative first. We don't.
riffic 6y ago
Use of Flash was antithetical to the Open Web.
- Marazan 6y ago
  So instead we get propriety apps. Good job.
thraway8195671 6y ago
IMO it's almost certainly not the "open letter"; Flash was Adobe's effort of having a runtime that they controlled, to enable authoring rich content - you need to understand that Adobe didn't directly make money from the player, and the publicity it got from it was increasingly negative due to the usage in ads (which were often not very carefully programmed, if I may add so). So you have this combination where Flash Player was costing Adobe lots of money to maintain, while not contributing too much to the topline; and on top of it, we made a prototype of CSS regions (basically reflowing text inside/outside arbitrary shapes) that was met with a lot of initial enthusiasm by all browser vendors/ they all seemed eager to adopt it. So the executive that was in charge of the digital media division just saw the opportunity to cut huge costs, and put Flash on life support basically overnight - by basically outsourcing the runtime work to the browser community, and contributing as Adobe in the points where we felt it was essential. There's stuff that I'm not sure I can tell even now even though it's old news... but let's just say that there were very big industry players that were taken by surprise and would've otherwise supported Flash; the death of Flash on mobile and on the web at that point was far from being a foregone conclusion (in fact, Flash support was being touted at the time by Samsung as one of the reasons why Android is better than iOS). Now - don't get me wrong, I was not in any way among the decision makers. But I was in the development team - both for Flash player and for the prototype that I believe sealed Flash's fate. I may be wrong; but OTOH there's a good chance my recollection of the events is far closer to the truth than the random internet narrative.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  Did you happen to be there for Adobe's "premium licensing" debacle? I'd like to know exactly what the execs were thinking trying to charge Unity developers for something the web could already do (WebGL + emscripten).
scarface74 6y ago
There is a lot more to the story. Adobe claimed that it could get Flash working on the first iPhone if Apple had allowed it. However, when Adobe did finally get Flash working on Android (barely) it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The original iPhone had 128Mb RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until five years later that the first iPhone had those specks. Not to mention that Adobe said they would have Flash working in the Motorola Xoom on day 1. It wasn’t. Leaving the Xoom in the embarrassing position where you couldn’t view the Xoom home page on the Xoom.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > However, when Adobe did finally get Flash working on Android (barely) it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The original iPhone had 128Mb RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until five years later that the first iPhone had those specks. OTOH, the Wii's web browser supported Flash and it had only 88 MB of RAM, so I'm not sure what was going on with Android.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    That was Flash Lite.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      Oh, maybe Flash Lite wasn't so bad then! It worked well on the Wii; I would have loved to have it on my iPod Touch in 2009.
micheljansen 6y ago
The writing was on the wall already, but Apple definitely put the final nail in its coffin. Just think about what might have happened though. Suppose the iPhone would have supported Flash, and supported it without performance or battery issues (a big if!). This would have allowed rich application development with a very mature toolchain for the pre-app store iPhone. How different things might have played out. That whole first wave of iPhone apps and games (air hockey, light saber, flash light, angry birds)? Flash! Who knows what the impact might have been on the App Store and the demise of Flash.
aksss 6y ago
That open letter is dated 2010. Flash was dead-man-walking for years before that insofar as new development was concerned. I was there. I would propose that any serious web app development team grouped Flash on the client in the same "basket of deplorables" as the JRE, ActiveX and Silverlight long before 2010. Just a headache waiting to cause you compatibility support calls. Client plugins were to be avoided at all costs if possible. I agree with other comments that Apple was killing flash only in the sense of putting it out of its misery - like a bullet for lame horse - and only waited as long as it did for compatibility reasons.

by htk 6y ago

chc 6y ago

Yep. At the time, it was kind of a controversial decision. Now it seems obvious.

ChrisSD 6y ago
That Flash should be deprecated wasn't controversial (at least amongst tech savvy people). What was controversial was not supporting it at all, because doing so locked out a lot of the web of the time. Especially certain enterprise sites but also a lot of video sites or even ordering a taxi in some cases. That said, the iPhone was in a particularly unique position to push through a change like this and force websites to adapt. iPhones were becoming popular with upper management so a website that didn't work for them was actually considered an issue worth addressing. Nowadays Chrome would also have a good chance of forcing similar changes.

uhhyeahdude 6y ago

That is one of the more well-reasoned and thoroughly explained pieces of corporate communication I’ve read. I wonder if the “Jobs style” has been widely adopted in the corporate world; I feel like I see it more and more often these days.

cxr 6y ago

The other thing that was always notable about this letter is Jobs's own use of the term "PCs" to refer generically to a form factor (that would include Macs), and not the long-dead trademark for IBM's product line of home computers from the 1980s.

DannyB2 6y ago
Prior to the IBM PC, ironically, Steve Jobs had coined the term "personal" computer. Prior to this term, they were called "micro" computers "home brew", "toy", "small", etc. The idea of one man, one machine. A computer that is personal -- like a toothbrush is personal. It is irony that IBM used the term on its microcomputer.

akersten 6y ago

Would this be considered anti-competitive today? Let's say you control a major internet browser (or have good knowledge to believe that your iPhone's Safari will become a major internet browser) and specifically exclude support for a competitor's platform (forcing people to the App Store/Apple ecosystem to create similar experiences). On its face, and outside the technical considerations of Flash as a platform, it seems like a move to directly subsume a huge market share. I'm surprised this angle hasn't gotten more discussion. Personally, I think the bar for anti-trust in tech is very, very high and this doesn't meet it (and neither would current shenanigans du jour) but interested to hear what others think, or how they think it's different. It's kind of nuanced since it's more like one vendor not developing support for a competitor, rather than impeding them after-the-fact.

clairity 6y ago
it's clearly anti-competitive, then and now. whether it's an abuse of monopoly power or an anti-trust violation is open for debate (particularly, how you define markets for analytical purposes).
- bdcravens 6y ago
  Given the high percentage of Android phones, there was no monopoly to abuse.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  They had legitimate cause to keep a bloated, buggy, resource hog off of iPhone 1. Adobe had plenty of time to clean up their act and never has.
- simonh 6y ago
  Do you think companies should always be expected adopt and implement the proprietary products and technology of other companies in their products? That seems like an extremely broad expectation. For example cars nowadays have computerised entertainment systems. If your a car manufacturer and I bring out a service for use in cars with a free client app, should I be able to sue you if you don't put my client app in your car and integrate it into your infotainment systems at no cost to me? If I bring out a new proprietary internet technology, should I be able to sue all the phone manufacturers that don't build in support for it into their phones at their own expense? I'm having difficulty seeing how this ability for companies to unilaterally impose obligations on other companies, enforceable on anti-trust grounds is practical.

Scene_Cast2 6y ago

It also signaled the end of the golden era of amateur 2D games and drawn movies (i.e. what Newgrounds was famous for). I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content, unfortunately.

amatecha 6y ago
Yup, the advent of Flash animations was the one time that almost all of my friends and I were able to produce _some_ kind of animation. We all had silly little things we put on Newgrounds, when none of us (well, except me) had any prior animation experience. It was a pretty empowering experience and I remember the relative ease with which we could produce some pretty nice-looking stuff. Of course, that's about all I miss about Flash, but it was a really great time while it lasted. :)
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Flash sucked for a lot of things but what it was an unsung hero for was actually being an outlet and onramp for adolescent creativity. Children online during that era were not just staring into YouTube videos served up by the algorithm they were clicking around Flash compilation sites with animations, games etc and many would eventually pirate a copy of Flash. The beauty of the tool, especially in the AS2 era was you could open it up and start animating straight away but then to add sounds or loops you had to add little bits of code into the timeline. This was a perfect way for many to start dabbling with and understanding coding.
- detritus 6y ago
  'Adolescent' seems a bit dismissive, although I'm sure you didn't mean it that way. Flash opened up digital experience creation for a multitude of people of all ages - th emost interactively interesting web rode off the back of Flash for a good decade and more. Personally I never much liked Flash, and only resorted to it for things that were out of reach of my meagre capabilities, adding to HTML etc.
- asdff 6y ago
  I think this is a little dismissive of kids today. How many kids actually bothered pirating a copy of Flash vs. just mindless playing bloons tower defense? You could argue that this low stakes gaming has been replaced by phone apps. But kids today are learning from what they watch on youtube: far more kids are making their own videos for their youtube channel or tiktok account and learning about av production in the process, than kids learning flash programming 15 years ago. Sure it starts small with your phone camera, but look at the production quality of some of these influencers: they are investing in good cameras, microphones, lighting, sound proofing, editing software, and that is something you need to learn a little bit about video production to effectively set up, and these are still marketable skills.

jimmaswell 6y ago

Flash didn't die a natural death, it was murdered by companies that resent any loss of control over their users. Complaints by Jobs weren't in good faith overall - Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day. Jobs was just a control freak along with wanting to keep games/interactive content in the walled-off app store (plain web capability wasn't there yet at the time), Google can't collect data from Flash content as easily and wants its developers more focused on advertising than supporting the ever-dwindling feature list of Chrome (who cares about features like extension capability or viewing flash content when we already captured a ton of users bundling the browser with random installers and we can advertise on the google home page), and Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does. We could still be in that brief utopia of new HTML5 capability coexisting with first-class Flash support if the politics played out differently.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does. I think Mozilla's incentives for minimizing Flash were relatively aligned with their principles: Flash is a proprietary technology from a single company, not an open standard. I also think that's a valid criticism, and why a lot of other tech enthusiasts didn't mind seeing Flash die, either. I largely agree with you though—Flash was a good technology, and the clear line in the sand it created between "web pages as documents" and "interactive content" had a lot of advantages. I also don't think it was any more bloated than modern HTML web apps, although it felt heavier at the time due to our more limited hardware capabilities.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  Was NSAPI not an open standard?
  - narag 6y ago
    You mean NPAPI, right?
    - 6y ago

DannyB2 6y ago

Flash did not run on every possible platform that web browsers ran on. Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux. Flash needed to move aside so that the web standards could advance to the point where Flash was no longer necessary. Not only did Flash need to die, but all browser plug ins: Flash, Java Applets, ActiveX and Silverlight. Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do amazing things in them, confident that it works on any client without 3rd party extensions. Flash (and Applets, ActiveX) served a short term purpose. Silverlight was an attempt, too late, to capture Flash's success.

erichocean 6y ago
> confident that it works on any client LOL, I think you mean: on Chrome (and if we're lucky, Firefox).
- acdha 6y ago
  I develop in Firefox and it’s pretty rare that I have to spend time on other browsers, which was not the case a decade ago. It’s also not like Flash was perfect at this: I ran into compatibility issues where something worked on Windows but not macOS or vice versa, and the frictional cost of having an unstable, primitive IDE was significant — especially since Adobe typically ignored bug reports until the next major release, at which point they’d tell you that you should drop $500 for the privilege of seeing whether they’d fixed it.
  - erichocean 6y ago
    Firefox => Chrome works pretty well. The other direction? Not so much…
    - gmanley 6y ago
      It really depends on what you are developing. If you are using cutting edge browser features. Things like WASM or new JS APIs, sure you'll likely run into incompatibilities. However, if you are building a pretty standard content website, not a single page app, from my experience, pretty much everything just works between browsers. This was definitely not the case 10 years ago. Especially when including IE in the mix.

cryptoz 6y ago

The decline of Flash did not begin with Steve Jobs. Maybe accelerated, but definitely not started. Flash was already long on its way out due to many of the reasons Jobs listed.

shadowgovt 6y ago
Essentially, the web migrated to the mobile format and Flash was extremely ill-prepared to make that jump, inside and out.

asciident 6y ago

I think that's rewriting history a bit. The decline certainly didn't begin with Apple's decision. Apple saw where things were headed, and jumped on (an early) bandwagon. Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. I hope in a few years people don't start saying that Apple killed Flash, as I remember specifically that was not what happened at that time.

JimDabell 6y ago
There was already a strong decline underway, but there were plenty of people who were convinced it would stick around. Apple's decision was the nail in the coffin.
liquidise 6y ago
As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube announcement in Jan 2010 of an experimental HTML5 video player. It took years for that player to become the standard. Apple may well have seen the writing on the wall, but to say "everyone hated or was avoiding flash" is objectively false.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  This comports well with my memory of the time. I remember there being a lot of "Flash sucks" sentiment online, but no decent alternatives. The days of entire UIs done in Flash was largely over by 2010, IIRC, but there were still things like video playback that couldn't be handled easily without Flash. I remember explicitly installing Flash on Linux, simply so I could watch Youtube with relatively little friction. In my mind, by that time, that was the main purpose of having Flash around at all. I am really glad HTML 5 has matured to the point that it has. Not having to have an entirely separate runtime environment running in the browser window makes things so much more stable than before. Now, if only we could figure out a way to make having lots of tabs not be painful, and maybe get a bit of a handle on memory usage, I think I might very well be out of things to complain about in terms of basic browser usability. ;)
  - 6y ago

eli 6y ago

That was a big deal at the time, but Flash was on the decline well before then and it was obvious where things were headed. You could technically run Flash on early Android phones, but it was horribly slow and barely functional. Too processor intensive, too hard to make responsive content, and that's on top of all the security and other concerns. Flash was never going to survive the shift to mobile. Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its demise, but not by much.

bdcravens 6y ago
> Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its demise, but not by much. To be fair, Apple's influence was far greater in the smart phone space than the PC space.
- eli 6y ago
  You're right, but I really do think it was inevitable. Flash Lite just didn't run well on any of its supported platforms at the time, and the then-new technology "HTML5" had the advantage of being simpler and more open. The main thing Flash had going for it was the inertia from developers who already knew it. If you're interested here's a blogpost from Adobe's developer relations person at the time of Flash on Mobile's demise http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/ http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-o...

duxup 6y ago

IMO Flash was already languishing and Steve's criticisms were valid. It was a big deal when Steve made the call, but I'm not sure the call was a random act of Steve as much as, Flash was hardly in great shape. It was home to a lot of content you couldn't find elsewhere, but Apple not supporting flash didn't happen in a vacuum.

robertoandred 6y ago
On the contrary, people thought the iPhone not supporting Flash would make it a non-starter and give Android a huge leg up. Flash was viewed not as languishing but as a fundamental requirement.
- duxup 6y ago
  Pundits being wrong doesn't really change the reality of the state of flash.

buboard 6y ago

Another sign of the tech regression is that we don't have a robust alternative that does the things Flash did. No easy-to-use and publish editor, no robust video/audio streaming server/client combo. Today's HTML alternatives are so convoluted and bad to integrate that we need to use proprietary/closed platforms (e.g. Unity, youtube) Apple never really loved the web. Web animation and gaming are still behind what you could very easily do with flash, webrtc+video are horrible battery drains etc. Ironic, considering that one of the reasons that Jobs bashed flash was that it drained the battery. And that he replaced "not open" flash games with his own Closed Platform and App Store garden. The whole reasoning in that letter reeks of hypocrisy , it should be obvious in retrospect. On top of that , modern "HTML sites" are much worse performance-wise than the equivalent flash. Abandon flash : sure, it's old and unsafe and nobody wants browser plugins. But make sure you have a decent alternative first. We don't.

riffic 6y ago

Use of Flash was antithetical to the Open Web.

Marazan 6y ago
So instead we get propriety apps. Good job.

thraway8195671 6y ago

IMO it's almost certainly not the "open letter"; Flash was Adobe's effort of having a runtime that they controlled, to enable authoring rich content - you need to understand that Adobe didn't directly make money from the player, and the publicity it got from it was increasingly negative due to the usage in ads (which were often not very carefully programmed, if I may add so). So you have this combination where Flash Player was costing Adobe lots of money to maintain, while not contributing too much to the topline; and on top of it, we made a prototype of CSS regions (basically reflowing text inside/outside arbitrary shapes) that was met with a lot of initial enthusiasm by all browser vendors/ they all seemed eager to adopt it. So the executive that was in charge of the digital media division just saw the opportunity to cut huge costs, and put Flash on life support basically overnight - by basically outsourcing the runtime work to the browser community, and contributing as Adobe in the points where we felt it was essential. There's stuff that I'm not sure I can tell even now even though it's old news... but let's just say that there were very big industry players that were taken by surprise and would've otherwise supported Flash; the death of Flash on mobile and on the web at that point was far from being a foregone conclusion (in fact, Flash support was being touted at the time by Samsung as one of the reasons why Android is better than iOS). Now - don't get me wrong, I was not in any way among the decision makers. But I was in the development team - both for Flash player and for the prototype that I believe sealed Flash's fate. I may be wrong; but OTOH there's a good chance my recollection of the events is far closer to the truth than the random internet narrative.

kmeisthax 6y ago
Did you happen to be there for Adobe's "premium licensing" debacle? I'd like to know exactly what the execs were thinking trying to charge Unity developers for something the web could already do (WebGL + emscripten).

scarface74 6y ago

There is a lot more to the story. Adobe claimed that it could get Flash working on the first iPhone if Apple had allowed it. However, when Adobe did finally get Flash working on Android (barely) it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The original iPhone had 128Mb RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until five years later that the first iPhone had those specks. Not to mention that Adobe said they would have Flash working in the Motorola Xoom on day 1. It wasn’t. Leaving the Xoom in the embarrassing position where you couldn’t view the Xoom home page on the Xoom.

deleted 6y ago
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Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> However, when Adobe did finally get Flash working on Android (barely) it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The original iPhone had 128Mb RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until five years later that the first iPhone had those specks. OTOH, the Wii's web browser supported Flash and it had only 88 MB of RAM, so I'm not sure what was going on with Android.
- scarface74 6y ago
  That was Flash Lite.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Oh, maybe Flash Lite wasn't so bad then! It worked well on the Wii; I would have loved to have it on my iPod Touch in 2009.

micheljansen 6y ago

The writing was on the wall already, but Apple definitely put the final nail in its coffin. Just think about what might have happened though. Suppose the iPhone would have supported Flash, and supported it without performance or battery issues (a big if!). This would have allowed rich application development with a very mature toolchain for the pre-app store iPhone. How different things might have played out. That whole first wave of iPhone apps and games (air hockey, light saber, flash light, angry birds)? Flash! Who knows what the impact might have been on the App Store and the demise of Flash.

aksss 6y ago

That open letter is dated 2010. Flash was dead-man-walking for years before that insofar as new development was concerned. I was there. I would propose that any serious web app development team grouped Flash on the client in the same "basket of deplorables" as the JRE, ActiveX and Silverlight long before 2010. Just a headache waiting to cause you compatibility support calls. Client plugins were to be avoided at all costs if possible. I agree with other comments that Apple was killing flash only in the sense of putting it out of its misery - like a bullet for lame horse - and only waited as long as it did for compatibility reasons.