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Let’s pretend that Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone. Would Flash still have continued to be viable? It’s really difficult to thought experiment that out, but,

Let’s pretend that Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone. Would Flash still have continued to be viable? It’s really difficult to thought experiment that out, but, given the need for responsive designs, and the maturation of JS and the whole React/Angular/etc paradigm, would Flash still have stuck around? (I realize that a lot of the JS improvements came about because you now could not guarantee Flash, so you had to flesh out the native browser APIs. Remember Flash file uploads? Or using Flash to copy to clipboard?)

Jtsummers 6y ago
HTML/JS was already improving, wrt better handling of the kinds of things Flash was specifically used for (graphics based interactive applications) before the iPhone was released and became popular. The canvas element was introduced around 2004, WebGL started with Canvas 3d around 2006. At that point, I think the writing was on the wall, Flash was a proprietary format that had many of the same issues as Java Applets. Something better integrated into the presentation experience (JS and canvas/webgl) was going to overtake it as it created a more uniform developer/content producer target. And with improvements to JS performance, and the general improvement of computer performance, it was inevitable. Additionally, you couldn't guarantee Flash availability even before the iPhone. Non-Windows/Mac systems didn't guarantee it, and many corporate networks eliminated it from their computers (though, ironically, now the main reason I still deal with Flash is my employer's training system). Cutting it from iOS, and the popularity of both the iPhone and later iPad, just hastened the decline.
pjmlp 6y ago
Flash continued to be available on iPhone, despite urban myths. Adobe was quick to react and added support for AOT compilation to native code for iOS. So plenty of casual games before the rise of Unity, Unreal, SpriteKit, Cocos, were actually AOT compiled Flash games.
- perardi 6y ago
  I am certain that, colloquially, when people say “Flash”, they mean “the web browser plugin that runs animated content inside of a web browser” and not “that Adobe AIR thing”.
flashnext 6y ago
Creating a throwaway account to comment as I worked with the Flash team when things came to a close... Who knows if Flash would still be around today, but there was a great deal of innovation happening on the Flash engine up until the point the Flash Runtime team was effectively dissolved, because of Apple's decision. Up until that point, Adobe worked very close with Apple to recreate the Flash Platform from ground up with an entirely new engine. The new engine was vastly superior, and passed all of Apple's requested criteria for performance and memory usage on iOS. The runtime overhead compared to native was astoundingly very close, and effectively negligible for game development. In fact it was so efficient that most people internally thought that the new Flash engine could outcompete Java for general purpose cross-platform runtime based on several internal benchmarks. Even the language was improved with ActionScript4 (including Generics support) and things like threading/parallelism, simd, etc support was a focus. However, everything went south when Apple when, despite the new Flash engine exceeding their requested requirements, Apple decided at the last minute that they are pulling out of the agreement. While it was not explicitly said, it was implied that Apple thought Flash support may hinder native game development that then could be sold on the iOS store. Once Apple pulled out, it was the straw that broke the camel's back as the massive investment into the new rewrite of the platform couldn't be justified. It was really sad as we had brilliant engineers and researchers working for years on the rewrite. But, sometimes that's life. It's not well known, but ActionScript 4 language specs was publicly released: https://github.com/adobe-research/ActionScript4 https://github.com/adobe-research/ActionScript4 More info: http://www.rivellomultimediaconsulting.com/actionscript-4-revealed/ http://www.rivellomultimediaconsulting.com/actionscript-4-re...
- vlovich123 6y ago
  I worked at Palm on WebOS. If this is the same engine we got for WebOS (which is also what Android phones had afaik), it was still enormously power hungry, slow, unstable, and ripe for security exploits. I’m not sure I’d buy the claim that you met their requirements as security would be a big one, especially since Safari already had a huge attack surface for quite a while on iOS and Flash integration would effectively be increasing that many times over.
  - 6y ago
jokoon 6y ago
Flash is a blackbox, and is a completely closed environment, and it's only software, there is little hardware relation. So no. Even today, windows is able to survive because of hardware. Flash could have gained from opening their format and making it a little more standard. I'm really happy that it's dead.
- pan69 6y ago
  Although the Flash authoring and Flash Player software have always been closed source, Macromedia, and later Adobe, have for a long time opened various formats used in the Flash ecosystem. Some examples: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil... https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/amf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/amf-fil... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software)
nicetryguy 6y ago
No. It was designed for desktops, as Jobs stated in his thoughts, it really requires a keyboard and a mouse for most SWF's to work properly. It also became feature rich and power hungry at a time when Mobile devices were taking off, so it was never going to run on the mobile devices of the day. This is all besides the fact that its custom networking features were proprietary, highly exploitable and notoriously buggy. It was great for it's day, and still has features and advantages in animation and networking that JS Canvas or Node can't equal today; but it had to go. I loved Flash and worked as an AS3 dev professionally, so i wanted it to succeed as much as anyone, but it did not adapt or fix its issues so it had to die. Good riddance.

Jtsummers 6y ago

HTML/JS was already improving, wrt better handling of the kinds of things Flash was specifically used for (graphics based interactive applications) before the iPhone was released and became popular. The canvas element was introduced around 2004, WebGL started with Canvas 3d around 2006. At that point, I think the writing was on the wall, Flash was a proprietary format that had many of the same issues as Java Applets. Something better integrated into the presentation experience (JS and canvas/webgl) was going to overtake it as it created a more uniform developer/content producer target. And with improvements to JS performance, and the general improvement of computer performance, it was inevitable. Additionally, you couldn't guarantee Flash availability even before the iPhone. Non-Windows/Mac systems didn't guarantee it, and many corporate networks eliminated it from their computers (though, ironically, now the main reason I still deal with Flash is my employer's training system). Cutting it from iOS, and the popularity of both the iPhone and later iPad, just hastened the decline.

pjmlp 6y ago

Flash continued to be available on iPhone, despite urban myths. Adobe was quick to react and added support for AOT compilation to native code for iOS. So plenty of casual games before the rise of Unity, Unreal, SpriteKit, Cocos, were actually AOT compiled Flash games.

perardi 6y ago
I am certain that, colloquially, when people say “Flash”, they mean “the web browser plugin that runs animated content inside of a web browser” and not “that Adobe AIR thing”.

flashnext 6y ago

Creating a throwaway account to comment as I worked with the Flash team when things came to a close... Who knows if Flash would still be around today, but there was a great deal of innovation happening on the Flash engine up until the point the Flash Runtime team was effectively dissolved, because of Apple's decision. Up until that point, Adobe worked very close with Apple to recreate the Flash Platform from ground up with an entirely new engine. The new engine was vastly superior, and passed all of Apple's requested criteria for performance and memory usage on iOS. The runtime overhead compared to native was astoundingly very close, and effectively negligible for game development. In fact it was so efficient that most people internally thought that the new Flash engine could outcompete Java for general purpose cross-platform runtime based on several internal benchmarks. Even the language was improved with ActionScript4 (including Generics support) and things like threading/parallelism, simd, etc support was a focus. However, everything went south when Apple when, despite the new Flash engine exceeding their requested requirements, Apple decided at the last minute that they are pulling out of the agreement. While it was not explicitly said, it was implied that Apple thought Flash support may hinder native game development that then could be sold on the iOS store. Once Apple pulled out, it was the straw that broke the camel's back as the massive investment into the new rewrite of the platform couldn't be justified. It was really sad as we had brilliant engineers and researchers working for years on the rewrite. But, sometimes that's life. It's not well known, but ActionScript 4 language specs was publicly released: https://github.com/adobe-research/ActionScript4 https://github.com/adobe-research/ActionScript4 More info: http://www.rivellomultimediaconsulting.com/actionscript-4-revealed/ http://www.rivellomultimediaconsulting.com/actionscript-4-re...

vlovich123 6y ago
I worked at Palm on WebOS. If this is the same engine we got for WebOS (which is also what Android phones had afaik), it was still enormously power hungry, slow, unstable, and ripe for security exploits. I’m not sure I’d buy the claim that you met their requirements as security would be a big one, especially since Safari already had a huge attack surface for quite a while on iOS and Flash integration would effectively be increasing that many times over.
- 6y ago

jokoon 6y ago

Flash is a blackbox, and is a completely closed environment, and it's only software, there is little hardware relation. So no. Even today, windows is able to survive because of hardware. Flash could have gained from opening their format and making it a little more standard. I'm really happy that it's dead.

pan69 6y ago
Although the Flash authoring and Flash Player software have always been closed source, Macromedia, and later Adobe, have for a long time opened various formats used in the Flash ecosystem. Some examples: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil... https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/amf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/amf-fil... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software)

nicetryguy 6y ago

No. It was designed for desktops, as Jobs stated in his thoughts, it really requires a keyboard and a mouse for most SWF's to work properly. It also became feature rich and power hungry at a time when Mobile devices were taking off, so it was never going to run on the mobile devices of the day. This is all besides the fact that its custom networking features were proprietary, highly exploitable and notoriously buggy. It was great for it's day, and still has features and advantages in animation and networking that JS Canvas or Node can't equal today; but it had to go. I loved Flash and worked as an AS3 dev professionally, so i wanted it to succeed as much as anyone, but it did not adapt or fix its issues so it had to die. Good riddance.