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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) b

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. ;)
  - anthk 6y ago
    You had the video plugin, x-mplayerplug-in, with either mplayer, vlc or mozplugger.
- bdcravens 6y ago
  I don't think anyone hated it, but it definitely wasn't in the "loved" category either - more of a "tolerated it as a necessary evil"
  - elicash 6y ago
    I think the way to settle this -- and I'm not taking sides here -- is to look at the original Hacker News reception to this letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310
    - bdcravens 6y ago
      Going back to the original comment, "Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point", I think you have to look at as being a broader concern than HN, a subculture that doesn't reflect "everyone".
      - elicash 6y ago
        I don't think by "everyone" they meant people who weren't aware of what flash was and users. Just the people who could conceivably be trying to avoid it -- creative types and developers.
        Izkata 6y ago
        Even people who weren't aware. I distinctly remember a general dislike by people who didn't know the name of the technology, because parts of my highschool's homepage were implemented in Flash, and it didn't load right. In 2005-2006. They recognized it primarily because it was slow and messed with the right-click context menu.
    - thedonkeycometh 6y ago
      LOL at the python devs in the thread, such hope.
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
- xtracto 6y ago
  Yup, in 2012 I was writing web video players and ad-serving platforms for a video streaming company. It was all Flash, because there were no real alternatives. HTML5 was just kind of starting but HTML5+Video+JS did not allow to develop logic as complex as what AS3 provided.
- JiNCMG 6y ago
  If you were a laptop used then you hated flash. Except for a few times where the heat in the building was down and playing a flash video will transform your laptop to a desk space heater.
goalieca 6y ago
The iPhone did two amazing things: 1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :) 2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)
- mdoms 6y ago
  Wasn't the iPhone in USA exclusive to one carrier for, like, a decade? Meanwhile in the rest of the world carriers never really had any power over how we used our devices or what was on them.
  - Tostino 6y ago
    It was exclusive for AT&T from 2007 until 2011 I believe.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  That is completely false. Apple didn’t standardize anything on the web, nor followed standards. What Apple wanted (and achieved) was to push their App Store to control everything and get that 30% of sales on top. Even to this day Safari does not support standards that other browsers do. And, of course, they don’t allow other browsers to run on iOS.
  - kodt 6y ago
    You can get Firefox and Chrome for iOS...
    - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
      No, you cannot. They are wrappers of Safari's engine.
    - oxguy3 6y ago
trianglem 6y ago
It absolutely did. I was a Adobe Flex developer when Adobe handed over Flex to Apache and watched the whole thing crumble. Jobs definitely led the way on that.
- qwertox 6y ago
  I agree. Google wasn't really sure how to go about it in Android, we really have to thank Apple for this step. It was historical and the best that could happen to all of us, specially when the Flash cookies are taken into consideration.
cousin_it 6y ago
> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. "Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't created any alternative that kids would love as much. It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it, pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  If visual editing of the web died, why do I see squarespace ads everywhere?
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Squarespace is template-based. The developer created the overall site structure/layout, and the user is just changing out the content. Their templates are quite flexible, and there's a lot of them, but it's not quite creating something original.
- kelnos 6y ago
  It's regrettable that there's no good replacement for it, but Flash had deep by-design security issues that there was no way to fix (in addition to the garden-variety security bugs that Adobe seemed too incompetent or unwilling to fix). Flash had to go.
- andi999 6y ago
  I found it totally inaccessible. I knew how to programm in C, C++98 with QT, Python, but I couldnt figure out just how to get started with flash. Somehow i must have missed the easy part of it.
  - sireat 6y ago
    You could just write Actionscript . It was quite a pleasant and consistent experience compared to writing browser JS at the time(10+ years ago).
jjoonathan 6y ago
I think that's rewriting history a bit. Sure, many of us nerds knew that Flash was problematic abandonware and sort of wished it would go away long before Apple launched a nuke at it, but we were the exception. Most people then, as now, didn't really understand or care how damaging flash was to the tech ecosystem. Sure, they saw a few annoying ads and security warnings, but they broadly considered them "worth it" for the content. Apple not only spoke up about Flash being the industry limiting factor regarding device responsiveness, battery performance, and security, but they did something about it in the face of widespread condemnation and resentment that hasn't dissipated to this very day.
- hrktb 6y ago
  I'd argue the point is not how the public felt about about Flash, but how device makers saw it. Flash didn't make it on any other mobile platform. Serious attempts were being made way earlier than the iPhone, including for Symbian [0], making it available for high end feature phones. But all of them were horribly limited, and none could solve the rift between desktop Flash and low power devices flash. Jobs saying that Flash won't make it on the iPhone was the equivalent of announcing that the iPhone wouldn't use Intel chips, it was just putting a stake on a dead body so everyone could stop trying to revive it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Mobile_devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Mobile_devices
CodeWriter23 6y ago
Android continued to tout their ability to utilize Flash as a competitive edge long after Jobs’ letter.
- Tostino 6y ago
  And it was, at the time I had a full browser in my pocket and on my tablet that was able to do just about everything I could on my PC, whereas iPhone/iPads of the time were simply unable to do some of the tasks I was able to. I did not like flash on Android, but I was happy to have it available when things were still transitioning away from it.
- ksec 6y ago
  If my memory serves me correct, not all Android phone support Flash.
Lammy 6y ago
It was terrible on mobile and I also avoided it, but it seems naive to not consider that Apple were being protective of their new platform and didn't want any alternative application runtimes to take hold. Remember that the entire reason Adobe bought Macromedia/Flash in the first place (besides sheer market dominance) was to provide themselves a technical path forward from most of their products' classic Mac OS roots into the 64-bit/mobile era we're currently in. It's very obvious when you go back and see that the first version of Photoshop with a Flash-based UI and the first (Windows) 64-bit version of Photoshop were both CS4. Compare that to Photoshop CS3 where you don't have to dig very deeply into the Windows version's files before you start hitting the layers of what are obviously classic-Mac-style Resources.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  It’s terrible on desktop too.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    What you say _!!!_
shp0ngle 6y ago
They actually tried to get Flash running on Android for a while Not sure what came of that. I will probably need to google more
- pixelbath 6y ago
  There was a Flash Player for Android, but the app existed only as a standalone player for playing .swf files. A couple mobile browsers did include it as a plugin so Flash content over the web mostly worked, but performance and user experience were not great.
  - mobilio 6y ago
    Also it was power hungry app that drain too fast battery.
    - efreak 6y ago
      I remember GPS while driving would drain your battery faster than it could charge; you'd have to make sure your phone was fully charged, then keep it plugged in while driving--and it would still die in under an hour. There's still things you can do on your phone today to drain your battery quite fast; taking video is one such thing--I had my 2yo phone die in me last week because it was recording in my pocket--as is trying to run actual software through termux, playing games for too long, etc.
empath75 6y ago
People said at the time and for years aferwards that it would cause the iphone to fail. Multiple companies made 'supports Flash' a major part of the marketing. > https://techpinions.com/apple-claim-chowder-product/34156 https://techpinions.com/apple-claim-chowder-product/34156
kitotik 6y ago
And yet the lack of flash was generally in the top 3 reasons iPhone would never be a success(along with lack of copy/paste). If apple had rolled out support for flash, the native app boom probably would have looked a lot different as company’s wouldn’t have felt as much pressure to modernize their whole customer facing digital strategy.
radley 6y ago
Sorry, that is precisely what happened. In the Linux / programming world Flash was a pariah that didn't conform to their standards. But it was booming for creatives and end-users. In 2010, almost all websites used Flash video and Flash gaming was exploding on Facebook. (Apple had to fake their Keynote to demonstrate the iPhone could view the "entire internet.") Security complaints are a weak argument: both Apple and Google have had security issues on their proprietary platforms. (I'll concede Adobe was a very poor steward.) Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition. The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look weak. The iPhone business model depends on consumer lock-down, so making Flash compatible was counter-productive.
- nathancahill 6y ago
  Yep. I remember jailbreaking the original iPhone (or maybe the 3G) and installing some version of Flash on it for games. My friends all had Sony-Ericssons with some type of mobile Flash player. On the iPhone, Flash content sucked the battery to 0% in about 30 minutes, the phone would get super hot. Edit: I guess the project to run Flash Lite on Sony-Ericsson was called Project Capuchin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5He1Wxl-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5He1Wxl-Q
- chasing 6y ago
  It was a calculated sucker punch at a piece of software which was not designed with mobile or touch experiences in mind and was so tremendously buggy and unstable that it caused all sorts of issues on normal desktop browsers. A lot of people used Flash at the time, but a lot of people were also extremely frustrated with Adobe's apparent disinterest in making it a truly great piece of software. Steve Jobs wanted that mess kept as far away from Apple's shiny new platform as possible -- a completely justifiable stance.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  > Security complaints are a weak argument Performance, performance, performance. Battery life matters. Smooth animations matter. People seem awfully sure Apple's anti-Flash move was 100% motivated by platform-building and 0% by perf. I'm not so sure it was 100%/0%, because I actually saw how shockingly bad Flash perf was, and I saw how big Apple's perf push was at the time. One time (2010-ish?) I accidentally left SpinControl.app open after a dev session for ~1 week. SpinControl was an app that would automatically dump a stack trace whenever any application failed to drain its event queue for more than a few seconds and beachballed. Super handy. In any case, when I came back to development and noticed SpinControl, I was surprised to find that 100% of the hundreds of stack traces collected after my development session involved flash. Not 99%, not N-1, literally 100%. WebKit was finding its way into different applications so the symptoms weren't limited to Safari, but I still suspected that I had a filter enabled or something. Surely Flash couldn't have accounted for 100% of my beachballs? I triggered a Mail.app reindex, and sure enough, a stack trace popped up in SpinControl, this time in sqlite, as expected. It wasn't an instrumentation problem. Flash had literally been 100% responsible for all of my beachballs over the past week. Crazy. This was around the time that Apple started to push developers away from APIs that made it impossible for Apple to aggregate background thread wakeup events to save battery life. In other words: they were willing to sacrifice goodwill to obtain perf. I'll grant you that platform considerations likely played a big role in Apple's decision, but also remember that Flash was literally the single largest performance-limiting factor when it came to desktop freezes and battery life at the time, and that probably played a role too.
koonsolo 6y ago
Let's face reality here: Apple didn't care about the HTML5 standard, they just wanted games to go through their own app store instead of being freely available on the web. To this day iPhone still doesn't fully support HTML5: you cannot put a game canvas into fullscreen mode on iPhone (all other devices, including iPad, do support this). And when PWA's became available, they were very slow in supporting Add To HomeScreen. And when they did, nobody knew about it. So yeah, don't think apple did it to support standards. They did it to keep control within their own appstore.
- noobaccount 6y ago
  I worked at Apple. I don’t remember but I’m pretty sure perf just sucked, and I’m guessing there weren’t enough people to deal with it. Like, you are giving way too much credit to strategic thinking. It wasn’t like that. Nobody had a crystal ball.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    They certainly saw how profitable iTunes was and saw an opportunity to replicate that success with applications. They may not have predicted web browsers becoming as capable as they are, but I suspect that senior management saw a threat of mobile websites as app replacements. Even free apps generate revenue for Apple.
    - fomine3 6y ago
      The first iPhone doesn't have AppStore but has Safari. It seems that they don't expect its advantage initially.
- scarface74 6y ago
  So in that case you should see a plethora of successful profitable games on Android right? The iPhone had the ability to add a page to the home screen on day 1. Web apps were Jobs “Sweet solution” for apps on the original iPhone.
  - 6y ago
jbverschoor 6y ago
They 100% killed flash, and thankfully so. The rest, as happened many times, followed Apple. The reasons for banning flash were totally on point.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
thedonkeycometh 6y ago
No, it was literally Steve Jobs in 2010 saying he didn't want flash on mobile. Then it collapsed quite quickly after that as the barriers went up. 10 years later and mobile games still need to be made in Unity or Unreal. The new Meatboy won't come from HTML5, even if development was as easy. All the 3d engines you have in HTML5 owe a debt to actionscript and flash and still don't perform as well. People don't realise how liberating and easy the multimedia of the flash years were. You could literally make a animated film and show it globally in an hour. Nothing comes close, still. Maybe we'll get a Web Assembly flash tool, when we all have 8Ghz PCs.
BatFastard 6y ago
Jobs did this so that Apple could get the 30% cut on apps downloaded from the App Store. Otherwise everyone would just play Flash games that Apple got no cut of. Follow the money!
- robertoandred 6y ago
  Apple doesn’t get a cut of free games.
jm4 6y ago
Definitely rewriting history to say they started it, but it was the nail in the coffin for Flash. Many developers hated Flash by then and were advocating against it. Although it was starting to decline, the marketing people and some wannabe UX types were still pushing it. The Steve Jobs essay is when the anti-Flash movement went mainstream and it was awesome. Prior to that, there was a question of whether Apple would support it. Once it was definitive that they wouldn't, the writing was on the wall that Flash would not survive. It validated what many of us had been saying for at least a couple years and made it easy for us to dismiss Flash.
golergka 6y ago
Is it? I remember that even a similar pocket device such as PSP was able to play flash at the time, despite it being a huge memory hog. Until iPhone, any similar device that couldn't run flash was perceived as, simply, buggy.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  The PSP had a very outdated version of Flash (for the time) that wasn't compatible with a lot of content. It did work sometimes though, and it was great when it did. The Wii—while not portable—also supported an (outdated) version of Flash that I recall working quite well. There were even some Flash games explicitly designed to be used with the Wii Remote (although they couldn't really do anything special, they only had access to the IR pointer).
kmeisthax 6y ago
Flash became a mobile web non-citizen when the first iPhone released, back in 2008 when Flash was still popular enough for people to complain about it not being on the iPhone rather than to be happy that it was gone. "Thoughts on Flash" was published a few years later, in 2011, when Adobe wanted to add iOS app export to Flash - Apple responded by banning literally all third-party development tools. It was definitely a kick in the teeth to Adobe's attempts to pivot the product.
- Mirioron 6y ago
  >Apple responded by banning literally all third-party development tools. How was this not anticompetitive?
  - toast0 6y ago
    It is anticompetive, but it is apparently not prohibited anticompetitive conduct. All of the major consoles since the NES (except for early revisions of the Genesis) have used technical means to restrict publication of games, and there has been no antitrust action on that. Nintendo was in a price fixing lawsuit and settled that with coupons for games with the Nintendo seal of quality. If that's not subject to antitrust enforcement, why would the Apple app store criteria be?
    - kmeisthax 6y ago
      Interestingly enough the EU is looking at that. Also, the US FTC threatened to investigate Apple over the "no third-party tools" thing they imposed on developers alongside "Thoughts on Flash". That's why they never followed through and removed it from their App Store guidelines. So there is a limit - somewhere between "technical lockouts" and "we won't approve things made with third-party tools".
manigandham 6y ago
Flash was not hated. It was at its peak during 2008 when Flash games were making millions on Facebook and every media-related site used Flash interfaces. I remember being on Flashkit.com back then, and watching design houses like 2advanced.com release their next project. Apple's decision was a major factor, along with HTML5 finally being supported by browsers with native functionality for animations and video support that had vastly superior performance. In the next 4 years, mobile took off like crazy beyond anyone's expectations and by the time the legendary iPhone 4 was released, Flash was at the beginning of the end.
pathseeker 6y ago
There was no decline. I very distinctly remember laughing that iPhone couldn't support flash because so many websites were based on flash. I was a Blackberry user at the time and the best hope for a standard website was that it had some watered down "mobile website" with the same important info because nearly every local business that had a website with hours/location/contact info had it done in flash.
albedoa 6y ago
> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. Which point do you mean? 2007 or 2010? Flash was more popular than it had ever been when the iPhone was released, and the iPhone had been without Flash for three years when Jobs wrote his letter. Apple might not have aimed the gun, but they pulled the trigger.

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. ;)
- anthk 6y ago
  You had the video plugin, x-mplayerplug-in, with either mplayer, vlc or mozplugger.
bdcravens 6y ago
I don't think anyone hated it, but it definitely wasn't in the "loved" category either - more of a "tolerated it as a necessary evil"
- elicash 6y ago
  I think the way to settle this -- and I'm not taking sides here -- is to look at the original Hacker News reception to this letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    Going back to the original comment, "Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point", I think you have to look at as being a broader concern than HN, a subculture that doesn't reflect "everyone".
    - elicash 6y ago
      I don't think by "everyone" they meant people who weren't aware of what flash was and users. Just the people who could conceivably be trying to avoid it -- creative types and developers.
      - Izkata 6y ago
        Even people who weren't aware. I distinctly remember a general dislike by people who didn't know the name of the technology, because parts of my highschool's homepage were implemented in Flash, and it didn't load right. In 2005-2006. They recognized it primarily because it was slow and messed with the right-click context menu.
  - thedonkeycometh 6y ago
    LOL at the python devs in the thread, such hope.
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
xtracto 6y ago
Yup, in 2012 I was writing web video players and ad-serving platforms for a video streaming company. It was all Flash, because there were no real alternatives. HTML5 was just kind of starting but HTML5+Video+JS did not allow to develop logic as complex as what AS3 provided.
JiNCMG 6y ago
If you were a laptop used then you hated flash. Except for a few times where the heat in the building was down and playing a flash video will transform your laptop to a desk space heater.

goalieca 6y ago

The iPhone did two amazing things: 1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :) 2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)

mdoms 6y ago
Wasn't the iPhone in USA exclusive to one carrier for, like, a decade? Meanwhile in the rest of the world carriers never really had any power over how we used our devices or what was on them.
- Tostino 6y ago
  It was exclusive for AT&T from 2007 until 2011 I believe.
jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
That is completely false. Apple didn’t standardize anything on the web, nor followed standards. What Apple wanted (and achieved) was to push their App Store to control everything and get that 30% of sales on top. Even to this day Safari does not support standards that other browsers do. And, of course, they don’t allow other browsers to run on iOS.
- kodt 6y ago
  You can get Firefox and Chrome for iOS...
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    No, you cannot. They are wrappers of Safari's engine.
  - oxguy3 6y ago

trianglem 6y ago

It absolutely did. I was a Adobe Flex developer when Adobe handed over Flex to Apache and watched the whole thing crumble. Jobs definitely led the way on that.

qwertox 6y ago
I agree. Google wasn't really sure how to go about it in Android, we really have to thank Apple for this step. It was historical and the best that could happen to all of us, specially when the Flash cookies are taken into consideration.

cousin_it 6y ago

> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. "Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't created any alternative that kids would love as much. It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it, pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.

jjoonathan 6y ago
If visual editing of the web died, why do I see squarespace ads everywhere?
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Squarespace is template-based. The developer created the overall site structure/layout, and the user is just changing out the content. Their templates are quite flexible, and there's a lot of them, but it's not quite creating something original.
kelnos 6y ago
It's regrettable that there's no good replacement for it, but Flash had deep by-design security issues that there was no way to fix (in addition to the garden-variety security bugs that Adobe seemed too incompetent or unwilling to fix). Flash had to go.
andi999 6y ago
I found it totally inaccessible. I knew how to programm in C, C++98 with QT, Python, but I couldnt figure out just how to get started with flash. Somehow i must have missed the easy part of it.
- sireat 6y ago
  You could just write Actionscript . It was quite a pleasant and consistent experience compared to writing browser JS at the time(10+ years ago).

jjoonathan 6y ago

I think that's rewriting history a bit. Sure, many of us nerds knew that Flash was problematic abandonware and sort of wished it would go away long before Apple launched a nuke at it, but we were the exception. Most people then, as now, didn't really understand or care how damaging flash was to the tech ecosystem. Sure, they saw a few annoying ads and security warnings, but they broadly considered them "worth it" for the content. Apple not only spoke up about Flash being the industry limiting factor regarding device responsiveness, battery performance, and security, but they did something about it in the face of widespread condemnation and resentment that hasn't dissipated to this very day.

hrktb 6y ago
I'd argue the point is not how the public felt about about Flash, but how device makers saw it. Flash didn't make it on any other mobile platform. Serious attempts were being made way earlier than the iPhone, including for Symbian [0], making it available for high end feature phones. But all of them were horribly limited, and none could solve the rift between desktop Flash and low power devices flash. Jobs saying that Flash won't make it on the iPhone was the equivalent of announcing that the iPhone wouldn't use Intel chips, it was just putting a stake on a dead body so everyone could stop trying to revive it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Mobile_devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Mobile_devices

CodeWriter23 6y ago

Android continued to tout their ability to utilize Flash as a competitive edge long after Jobs’ letter.

Tostino 6y ago
And it was, at the time I had a full browser in my pocket and on my tablet that was able to do just about everything I could on my PC, whereas iPhone/iPads of the time were simply unable to do some of the tasks I was able to. I did not like flash on Android, but I was happy to have it available when things were still transitioning away from it.
ksec 6y ago
If my memory serves me correct, not all Android phone support Flash.

Lammy 6y ago

It was terrible on mobile and I also avoided it, but it seems naive to not consider that Apple were being protective of their new platform and didn't want any alternative application runtimes to take hold. Remember that the entire reason Adobe bought Macromedia/Flash in the first place (besides sheer market dominance) was to provide themselves a technical path forward from most of their products' classic Mac OS roots into the 64-bit/mobile era we're currently in. It's very obvious when you go back and see that the first version of Photoshop with a Flash-based UI and the first (Windows) 64-bit version of Photoshop were both CS4. Compare that to Photoshop CS3 where you don't have to dig very deeply into the Windows version's files before you start hitting the layers of what are obviously classic-Mac-style Resources.

jbverschoor 6y ago
It’s terrible on desktop too.
- Lammy 6y ago
  What you say _!!!_

shp0ngle 6y ago

They actually tried to get Flash running on Android for a while Not sure what came of that. I will probably need to google more

pixelbath 6y ago
There was a Flash Player for Android, but the app existed only as a standalone player for playing .swf files. A couple mobile browsers did include it as a plugin so Flash content over the web mostly worked, but performance and user experience were not great.
- mobilio 6y ago
  Also it was power hungry app that drain too fast battery.
  - efreak 6y ago
    I remember GPS while driving would drain your battery faster than it could charge; you'd have to make sure your phone was fully charged, then keep it plugged in while driving--and it would still die in under an hour. There's still things you can do on your phone today to drain your battery quite fast; taking video is one such thing--I had my 2yo phone die in me last week because it was recording in my pocket--as is trying to run actual software through termux, playing games for too long, etc.

empath75 6y ago

People said at the time and for years aferwards that it would cause the iphone to fail. Multiple companies made 'supports Flash' a major part of the marketing. > https://techpinions.com/apple-claim-chowder-product/34156 https://techpinions.com/apple-claim-chowder-product/34156

kitotik 6y ago

And yet the lack of flash was generally in the top 3 reasons iPhone would never be a success(along with lack of copy/paste). If apple had rolled out support for flash, the native app boom probably would have looked a lot different as company’s wouldn’t have felt as much pressure to modernize their whole customer facing digital strategy.

radley 6y ago

Sorry, that is precisely what happened. In the Linux / programming world Flash was a pariah that didn't conform to their standards. But it was booming for creatives and end-users. In 2010, almost all websites used Flash video and Flash gaming was exploding on Facebook. (Apple had to fake their Keynote to demonstrate the iPhone could view the "entire internet.") Security complaints are a weak argument: both Apple and Google have had security issues on their proprietary platforms. (I'll concede Adobe was a very poor steward.) Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition. The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look weak. The iPhone business model depends on consumer lock-down, so making Flash compatible was counter-productive.

nathancahill 6y ago
Yep. I remember jailbreaking the original iPhone (or maybe the 3G) and installing some version of Flash on it for games. My friends all had Sony-Ericssons with some type of mobile Flash player. On the iPhone, Flash content sucked the battery to 0% in about 30 minutes, the phone would get super hot. Edit: I guess the project to run Flash Lite on Sony-Ericsson was called Project Capuchin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5He1Wxl-Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5He1Wxl-Q
chasing 6y ago
It was a calculated sucker punch at a piece of software which was not designed with mobile or touch experiences in mind and was so tremendously buggy and unstable that it caused all sorts of issues on normal desktop browsers. A lot of people used Flash at the time, but a lot of people were also extremely frustrated with Adobe's apparent disinterest in making it a truly great piece of software. Steve Jobs wanted that mess kept as far away from Apple's shiny new platform as possible -- a completely justifiable stance.
jjoonathan 6y ago
> Security complaints are a weak argument Performance, performance, performance. Battery life matters. Smooth animations matter. People seem awfully sure Apple's anti-Flash move was 100% motivated by platform-building and 0% by perf. I'm not so sure it was 100%/0%, because I actually saw how shockingly bad Flash perf was, and I saw how big Apple's perf push was at the time. One time (2010-ish?) I accidentally left SpinControl.app open after a dev session for ~1 week. SpinControl was an app that would automatically dump a stack trace whenever any application failed to drain its event queue for more than a few seconds and beachballed. Super handy. In any case, when I came back to development and noticed SpinControl, I was surprised to find that 100% of the hundreds of stack traces collected after my development session involved flash. Not 99%, not N-1, literally 100%. WebKit was finding its way into different applications so the symptoms weren't limited to Safari, but I still suspected that I had a filter enabled or something. Surely Flash couldn't have accounted for 100% of my beachballs? I triggered a Mail.app reindex, and sure enough, a stack trace popped up in SpinControl, this time in sqlite, as expected. It wasn't an instrumentation problem. Flash had literally been 100% responsible for all of my beachballs over the past week. Crazy. This was around the time that Apple started to push developers away from APIs that made it impossible for Apple to aggregate background thread wakeup events to save battery life. In other words: they were willing to sacrifice goodwill to obtain perf. I'll grant you that platform considerations likely played a big role in Apple's decision, but also remember that Flash was literally the single largest performance-limiting factor when it came to desktop freezes and battery life at the time, and that probably played a role too.

koonsolo 6y ago

Let's face reality here: Apple didn't care about the HTML5 standard, they just wanted games to go through their own app store instead of being freely available on the web. To this day iPhone still doesn't fully support HTML5: you cannot put a game canvas into fullscreen mode on iPhone (all other devices, including iPad, do support this). And when PWA's became available, they were very slow in supporting Add To HomeScreen. And when they did, nobody knew about it. So yeah, don't think apple did it to support standards. They did it to keep control within their own appstore.

noobaccount 6y ago
I worked at Apple. I don’t remember but I’m pretty sure perf just sucked, and I’m guessing there weren’t enough people to deal with it. Like, you are giving way too much credit to strategic thinking. It wasn’t like that. Nobody had a crystal ball.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  They certainly saw how profitable iTunes was and saw an opportunity to replicate that success with applications. They may not have predicted web browsers becoming as capable as they are, but I suspect that senior management saw a threat of mobile websites as app replacements. Even free apps generate revenue for Apple.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    The first iPhone doesn't have AppStore but has Safari. It seems that they don't expect its advantage initially.
scarface74 6y ago
So in that case you should see a plethora of successful profitable games on Android right? The iPhone had the ability to add a page to the home screen on day 1. Web apps were Jobs “Sweet solution” for apps on the original iPhone.
- 6y ago

jbverschoor 6y ago

They 100% killed flash, and thankfully so. The rest, as happened many times, followed Apple. The reasons for banning flash were totally on point.

deleted 6y ago

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thedonkeycometh 6y ago

No, it was literally Steve Jobs in 2010 saying he didn't want flash on mobile. Then it collapsed quite quickly after that as the barriers went up. 10 years later and mobile games still need to be made in Unity or Unreal. The new Meatboy won't come from HTML5, even if development was as easy. All the 3d engines you have in HTML5 owe a debt to actionscript and flash and still don't perform as well. People don't realise how liberating and easy the multimedia of the flash years were. You could literally make a animated film and show it globally in an hour. Nothing comes close, still. Maybe we'll get a Web Assembly flash tool, when we all have 8Ghz PCs.

BatFastard 6y ago

Jobs did this so that Apple could get the 30% cut on apps downloaded from the App Store. Otherwise everyone would just play Flash games that Apple got no cut of. Follow the money!

robertoandred 6y ago
Apple doesn’t get a cut of free games.

jm4 6y ago

Definitely rewriting history to say they started it, but it was the nail in the coffin for Flash. Many developers hated Flash by then and were advocating against it. Although it was starting to decline, the marketing people and some wannabe UX types were still pushing it. The Steve Jobs essay is when the anti-Flash movement went mainstream and it was awesome. Prior to that, there was a question of whether Apple would support it. Once it was definitive that they wouldn't, the writing was on the wall that Flash would not survive. It validated what many of us had been saying for at least a couple years and made it easy for us to dismiss Flash.

golergka 6y ago

Is it? I remember that even a similar pocket device such as PSP was able to play flash at the time, despite it being a huge memory hog. Until iPhone, any similar device that couldn't run flash was perceived as, simply, buggy.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
The PSP had a very outdated version of Flash (for the time) that wasn't compatible with a lot of content. It did work sometimes though, and it was great when it did. The Wii—while not portable—also supported an (outdated) version of Flash that I recall working quite well. There were even some Flash games explicitly designed to be used with the Wii Remote (although they couldn't really do anything special, they only had access to the IR pointer).

kmeisthax 6y ago

Flash became a mobile web non-citizen when the first iPhone released, back in 2008 when Flash was still popular enough for people to complain about it not being on the iPhone rather than to be happy that it was gone. "Thoughts on Flash" was published a few years later, in 2011, when Adobe wanted to add iOS app export to Flash - Apple responded by banning literally all third-party development tools. It was definitely a kick in the teeth to Adobe's attempts to pivot the product.

Mirioron 6y ago
>Apple responded by banning literally all third-party development tools. How was this not anticompetitive?
- toast0 6y ago
  It is anticompetive, but it is apparently not prohibited anticompetitive conduct. All of the major consoles since the NES (except for early revisions of the Genesis) have used technical means to restrict publication of games, and there has been no antitrust action on that. Nintendo was in a price fixing lawsuit and settled that with coupons for games with the Nintendo seal of quality. If that's not subject to antitrust enforcement, why would the Apple app store criteria be?
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    Interestingly enough the EU is looking at that. Also, the US FTC threatened to investigate Apple over the "no third-party tools" thing they imposed on developers alongside "Thoughts on Flash". That's why they never followed through and removed it from their App Store guidelines. So there is a limit - somewhere between "technical lockouts" and "we won't approve things made with third-party tools".

manigandham 6y ago

Flash was not hated. It was at its peak during 2008 when Flash games were making millions on Facebook and every media-related site used Flash interfaces. I remember being on Flashkit.com back then, and watching design houses like 2advanced.com release their next project. Apple's decision was a major factor, along with HTML5 finally being supported by browsers with native functionality for animations and video support that had vastly superior performance. In the next 4 years, mobile took off like crazy beyond anyone's expectations and by the time the legendary iPhone 4 was released, Flash was at the beginning of the end.

pathseeker 6y ago

There was no decline. I very distinctly remember laughing that iPhone couldn't support flash because so many websites were based on flash. I was a Blackberry user at the time and the best hope for a standard website was that it had some watered down "mobile website" with the same important info because nearly every local business that had a website with hours/location/contact info had it done in flash.

albedoa 6y ago

> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. Which point do you mean? 2007 or 2010? Flash was more popular than it had ever been when the iPhone was released, and the iPhone had been without Flash for three years when Jobs wrote his letter. Apple might not have aimed the gun, but they pulled the trigger.