8 ms·

Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. They wanted the first iPhone(s) to have great battery life and the web was plagued by

by wil421 6y ago

Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. They wanted the first iPhone(s) to have great battery life and the web was plagued by flash intros, games, and what not at that time. It didn’t help it had a lot of security issues and it certainly helped its downfall. IMHO we are better without it and good riddance.

canofbars 6y ago
I'm guessing flash sites were also horrible on a small touch screen. The simple act of having to rewrite most of the web without flash in a time where smartphones existed probably did a lot of good.
BugsJustFindMe 6y ago
> Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. They wanted the first iPhone(s) to have great battery life and the web was plagued by flash intros, games, and what not at that time. But now the web is plagued by javascript doing the same, often even more intensively. Is it better or worse?
- outside1234 6y ago
  Better. JavaScript is a web standard.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    And flash couldn't have been one? Edit: I was 9 when Jobs wrote his thing on Flash, so I appreciate the downvotes for asking a question?
    - vondur 6y ago
      Probably would not happen under Adobe.
    - muldvarp 6y ago
      Flash was proprietary, didn't have a specification and only one real implementation ever existed.
      - johnchristopher 6y ago
        Flash was using actionscript which was ecma262-3/4.
        duskwuff 6y ago
        ActionScript only "existed" on the authoring side. Scripts were compiled to (proprietary) bytecode before being embedded in the SWF file. Besides, there's a lot more to SWF than the scripts.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - userbinator 6y ago
        What is all this BS about it being proprietary... 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... Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say. There's also a few other implementations, although they found use embedded in games and such instead of being browser plugins.
        anthk 6y ago
        It was and gnash/lightspark barely worked.
    - eropple 6y ago
      Could have? Sure, if some things broke the right way. Was gonna be? Not that I know of. Did? No.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- TwoBit 6y ago
  No, because JavaScript isn't nearly the bug factory that Flash was. Literally every month there was a new Flash full compromise bug, for multiple years.
  - nn3 6y ago
    Have you ever read the release notes of your browser? JavaScript has holes basically every month too
    - TwoBit 6y ago
      It's true that security bugs are being fixed in most Chrome releases. However, these seem to be much more obscure and/or hard to capitalize on compared to the Flash bugs. I admit I don't have a proof of that.
    - TwoBit 6y ago
      Lol read this which was just posted today and makes my claims seem stupid:https://threatpost.com/firefox-chrome-edge-bugs-system-hijacking/162873/ https://threatpost.com/firefox-chrome-edge-bugs-system-hijac... Well it still may be harder to attack this than Flash, but still...
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  Worse. You could use most websites with Flash disabled and get by fine. That's a lot more difficult with Javascript today. Flash had a much more arms-length relationship to the browser and wasn't able to be used as a surveillance tool as effectively as Javascript can be. The constrained nature of Flash made it less of a threat to an open and standards-based web than Javascript (and more broadly WASM). Edit: On the last point - Flash wasn't able to boot a virtual x86 in a browser. Obligatory reference: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
  - Tuna-Fish 6y ago
    You can use most websites with javascript disabled just fine. In fact, it generally greatly improves your experience. Thanks to the ADA, American sites (or sites that do a lot of business with America) must work with assistive technologies, mainly web browsers designed for the blind. Most of those do not run js. So, you cannot design your website so that it doesn't work with js disabled, unless you are willing to expose yourself to massive legal liability. People used to ignore this a lot, but since Domino’s Pizza v. Guillermo Robles, most sites have been fixed so that they are usable without js. I strongly recommend getting ublock, blocking all js by default, and then whitelisting sites where it is required/useful. It's hard to overstate just how much better it makes browsing in general.
    - EvanAnderson 6y ago
      You don't have to sell me. I've had Javascript disabled by default for a couple of years now. I love it. I'm a technical person. I can handle (and have the patience for) fidgeting with settings to get sites to work. My non-technical friends and family can't do that. Trying to impose that upon them would just frustrate them (and, for my family, increase tech support calls to me). All my banking and insurance sites are useless w/o Javascript. Squarespace sites, Twitter, Imgur, don't work worth a damn without Javascript. I just gave up and mostly gave Google properties a pass to get Youtube to work. (I don't use Gmail so I have no idea how bad it would be.) A site better be pretty damned compelling before it rises to the level of getting opened in an unconstrained browser setting. I just end up not opening a lot of stuff (or just closing it again when it lights-up "NoScript").
- egypturnash 6y ago
  Browsers can attempt to improve Javascript performance because it's an open standard. And 2d rendering performance, and 3d rendering performance, and whatever else. The only people who could improve the Flash plugin's performance were the people at Adobe working on it. And, well, Adobe just doesn't give two shits about performance of any of their tools unless they absolutely have to.
- wil421 6y ago
  Mildly better. Flash was more like Java applets than JavaScript. It was its own thing running in the browser.
- justsomeshmuck 6y ago
  From what I recall, Apple approached Adobe during development of iPhone to nail down performance/battery concerns of Flash and Adobe basically blew them off.
  - rendall 6y ago
    No. This is untrue. Apple had no intention of working with Adobe. Flash competed with the App Store. Adobe approached Apple many times to nail down performance issues and Apple blew them off
    - asddubs 6y ago
      There was no app store when the iphone launched
      - rendall 6y ago
        The App Store launched on July 10, 2008 one year and a half after the announcement of the iPhone. Previously there had been no 3rd party apps on the iPhone, only Apple-made native apps and 3rd party web apps. In that context, Flash's absence needed to be explained. Nevertheless, it took another 2 years for Jobs to write his screed, "Thoughts on Flash". By that time, Apple was well aware what a cash cow the App Store was
        throwaway201103 6y ago
        If the app store appeared 1.5 years after the first iPhones, it was already conceived and development well underway when the iPhone launched. I don't have any firsthand knowledge of who blew off whom, but I'd guess it was Apple doing the blowing because that's traditionally what they do.
        rendall 6y ago
        I'm not sure that Apple intended to exclude Flash from day 1. I imagine there were difficult technical integration issues, never mind any other business interests. But once the App Store was launched and Apple commanded a 30% share of every single application sold on the platform, I cannot imagine why they would allow Flash to give away comparable applications for free. The argument has merit that Apple wanted a more precise control over user experience, and badly written Flash apps could disrupt that, but I honestly believe that was a secondary concern compared to protecting their App Store revenue stream.
- userbinator 6y ago
  Jobs' rant about Flash was really a good example of "shooting the messenger". Flash is an intrinsically more efficient format; it was designed back when 56k modems were the norm, and computers far less powerful, so SWF made use of lots of interesting tricks to squeeze the most of out the platform and be extremely simple to parse. Those who remember playing Flash games will definitely know just how much computing power they needed --- a fraction of that needed for today's "equivalent" with HTML/CSS/JS. You will never get close to that level of efficiency with HTML/JS/CSS, although they are certainly trying with things like WASM. I say this as someone who has implemented a significant part of a SWF player, including parts of the AS2 VM.
MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I distinctly remember this and partially believe the growth of the iPhone accelerated the decline.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
papito 6y ago
It's kind of funny how Jobs declared War on Flash, but it had to be done. It made the web back in the olden days much more interesting and even amazing, but it had to be killed off, for great justice and, look, it took over a decade.
- adamredwoods 6y ago
  The adaption of web audio took forever, something that Flash did rather well: https://caniuse.com/audio-api https://caniuse.com/audio-api
TwoBit 6y ago
And Flash was proprietary. And its behavior was opaque. And it didn't mesh at all with the rest of your browser/website experience, as it was an embedded thing.
- adamredwoods 6y ago
  The makers of the browsers (Apple, Google, Microsoft) didn't want to optimize for someone else's (especially not Adobe, not even Unity3D, if anyone remembers that) plugin. So WHATG and W3C made their own 'html5 canvas' that didn't truly get official until 2014 (but was adopted earlier in browsers). https://web.archive.org/web/20141106212543/http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still-wrestle-over-webs-future https://web.archive.org/web/20141106212543/http://www.cnet.c...
8note 6y ago
That's a generous interpretation vs Apple wanting a monopoly on deciding what apps can run on iphones Not supporting flash is the basis for the app store
- mirthflat83 6y ago
  No. Apple was pushing for HTML5. In fact, they were imagining iOS Safari as an app platform in the beginning.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  Nope. The App Store wasn’t even a thing until iPhone OS 2.0 a whole year later. As mirthflat83 said, Jobs wanted an HTML5 future.
  - sergeykish 6y ago
    > Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. — Steve Jobs, October 10, 2007 (three month after iPhone release) [1]. How long does it takes to create SDK? Jobs is too smart, he carefully creates narrative, he is playing with audience. It is just a show, think Freddie Mercury, I do not understand how anyone can take his words at face value. [1] https://gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-iphone-sdk-in-dev-hands-february-08-311881 https://gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-iphone-sdk-in-dev-hands-febru...
josephg 6y ago
The real problem wasn't flash games. It was flash banner ads. Lots of badly written flash content would (even on desktop) completely peg a CPU core. And it would do that even when the content wasn't visible (for background tabs, or if you'd scrolled past the ad). This is bad enough on desktop, worse on a laptop (where you care more about battery and thermals) but it was a disaster on the very low power phones we had at the time. It made the iphone's browser feel extremely janky and unresponsive, and your phone would warm up in your hand. People had no idea that the problem was that "punch the monkey" banner ad they had already scrolled past. The website operator didn't know what ads were being served. Everyone just had a bad time. Steve Jobs was asked about it in an interview once and he said he'd never seen flash managing to work smoothly on a mobile device. He said if Adobe could show it working well, he'd reconsider. But as far as I could tell, Adobe never rose to the challenge. I think android had flash working for awhile, but they eventually dropped it too. (Probably for the same reason.) On desktop, I remember having an option in chrome to make flash not play by default. That way flash banner ads just wouldn't get loaded. I imagine they could have done the same for mobile safari - but that sort of thing was never Apple's aesthetic.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  > I think android had flash working for awhile, but they eventually dropped it too. (Probably for the same reason.) Yep. Between the performance issues and interface hangups (touch screen = no cursor = no mouse movement events), Flash for Android was basically unusable for most applications.
oblio 6y ago
There is the pretext and then there is the real reason. Which is the same reason that Apple allows only their browser engine used by every browser on iOS, has blocked JIT (again, only allowed for their Javascript interpreter), has a neutered implementation of progressive web apps, does not allow alternate app stores or side loading apps. Control. Money.
amelius 6y ago
> Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. Of course he hated it, because now everybody is writing software specifically for Apple instead of for the web.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  That’s revisionism. When the iPhone first came out, apps weren’t a thing. Jobs advocated for PWA (he didn’t want apps), but people complained about performance. So Apple added the App Store with iPhone OS 2.0.
  - studius 6y ago
    > apps weren’t a thing Yes and no. iPhone apps weren't a thing until they were, but there were Brew apps[1], Symbian apps[2], Blackberry apps[3], Palm apps[4], etc. [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for_Wireless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for... [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian [3]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_World [4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_OS
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      True true. But I was talking about just iPhone apps
rendall 6y ago
> Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. Jobs wanted Flash gone because it was direct competition to the App Store. That's it. There is no other reason. Jobs could not say that of course, so he used his massive platform to assert that HTML5 was just as good as Flash, and that Flash was "riddled with security holes". None of it was true, of course, but Jobs had charisma and a massive following of True Believers, and so his frontal assault on a competitor was successful. An entire industry and platform destroyed so that Apple could not only control what games were played on its platform, but to charge for them Yes, Flash had security issues, like every platform and program and browser ever, but there was nothing about Flash that was uniquely terrible the way Jobs and his minions asserted
tinus_hn 6y ago
Apple wanted native apps, not the ‘one size fits all’ poor experience Flash promotes.

by wil421 6y ago

canofbars 6y ago

I'm guessing flash sites were also horrible on a small touch screen. The simple act of having to rewrite most of the web without flash in a time where smartphones existed probably did a lot of good.

BugsJustFindMe 6y ago

> Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. They wanted the first iPhone(s) to have great battery life and the web was plagued by flash intros, games, and what not at that time. But now the web is plagued by javascript doing the same, often even more intensively. Is it better or worse?

outside1234 6y ago
Better. JavaScript is a web standard.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  And flash couldn't have been one? Edit: I was 9 when Jobs wrote his thing on Flash, so I appreciate the downvotes for asking a question?
  - vondur 6y ago
    Probably would not happen under Adobe.
  - muldvarp 6y ago
    Flash was proprietary, didn't have a specification and only one real implementation ever existed.
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      Flash was using actionscript which was ecma262-3/4.
      - duskwuff 6y ago
        ActionScript only "existed" on the authoring side. Scripts were compiled to (proprietary) bytecode before being embedded in the SWF file. Besides, there's a lot more to SWF than the scripts.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - userbinator 6y ago
      What is all this BS about it being proprietary... 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... Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say. There's also a few other implementations, although they found use embedded in games and such instead of being browser plugins.
      - anthk 6y ago
        It was and gnash/lightspark barely worked.
  - eropple 6y ago
    Could have? Sure, if some things broke the right way. Was gonna be? Not that I know of. Did? No.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
TwoBit 6y ago
No, because JavaScript isn't nearly the bug factory that Flash was. Literally every month there was a new Flash full compromise bug, for multiple years.
- nn3 6y ago
  Have you ever read the release notes of your browser? JavaScript has holes basically every month too
  - TwoBit 6y ago
    It's true that security bugs are being fixed in most Chrome releases. However, these seem to be much more obscure and/or hard to capitalize on compared to the Flash bugs. I admit I don't have a proof of that.
  - TwoBit 6y ago
    Lol read this which was just posted today and makes my claims seem stupid:https://threatpost.com/firefox-chrome-edge-bugs-system-hijacking/162873/ https://threatpost.com/firefox-chrome-edge-bugs-system-hijac... Well it still may be harder to attack this than Flash, but still...
EvanAnderson 6y ago
Worse. You could use most websites with Flash disabled and get by fine. That's a lot more difficult with Javascript today. Flash had a much more arms-length relationship to the browser and wasn't able to be used as a surveillance tool as effectively as Javascript can be. The constrained nature of Flash made it less of a threat to an open and standards-based web than Javascript (and more broadly WASM). Edit: On the last point - Flash wasn't able to boot a virtual x86 in a browser. Obligatory reference: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
- Tuna-Fish 6y ago
  You can use most websites with javascript disabled just fine. In fact, it generally greatly improves your experience. Thanks to the ADA, American sites (or sites that do a lot of business with America) must work with assistive technologies, mainly web browsers designed for the blind. Most of those do not run js. So, you cannot design your website so that it doesn't work with js disabled, unless you are willing to expose yourself to massive legal liability. People used to ignore this a lot, but since Domino’s Pizza v. Guillermo Robles, most sites have been fixed so that they are usable without js. I strongly recommend getting ublock, blocking all js by default, and then whitelisting sites where it is required/useful. It's hard to overstate just how much better it makes browsing in general.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    You don't have to sell me. I've had Javascript disabled by default for a couple of years now. I love it. I'm a technical person. I can handle (and have the patience for) fidgeting with settings to get sites to work. My non-technical friends and family can't do that. Trying to impose that upon them would just frustrate them (and, for my family, increase tech support calls to me). All my banking and insurance sites are useless w/o Javascript. Squarespace sites, Twitter, Imgur, don't work worth a damn without Javascript. I just gave up and mostly gave Google properties a pass to get Youtube to work. (I don't use Gmail so I have no idea how bad it would be.) A site better be pretty damned compelling before it rises to the level of getting opened in an unconstrained browser setting. I just end up not opening a lot of stuff (or just closing it again when it lights-up "NoScript").
egypturnash 6y ago
Browsers can attempt to improve Javascript performance because it's an open standard. And 2d rendering performance, and 3d rendering performance, and whatever else. The only people who could improve the Flash plugin's performance were the people at Adobe working on it. And, well, Adobe just doesn't give two shits about performance of any of their tools unless they absolutely have to.
wil421 6y ago
Mildly better. Flash was more like Java applets than JavaScript. It was its own thing running in the browser.
justsomeshmuck 6y ago
From what I recall, Apple approached Adobe during development of iPhone to nail down performance/battery concerns of Flash and Adobe basically blew them off.
- rendall 6y ago
  No. This is untrue. Apple had no intention of working with Adobe. Flash competed with the App Store. Adobe approached Apple many times to nail down performance issues and Apple blew them off
  - asddubs 6y ago
    There was no app store when the iphone launched
    - rendall 6y ago
      The App Store launched on July 10, 2008 one year and a half after the announcement of the iPhone. Previously there had been no 3rd party apps on the iPhone, only Apple-made native apps and 3rd party web apps. In that context, Flash's absence needed to be explained. Nevertheless, it took another 2 years for Jobs to write his screed, "Thoughts on Flash". By that time, Apple was well aware what a cash cow the App Store was
      - throwaway201103 6y ago
        If the app store appeared 1.5 years after the first iPhones, it was already conceived and development well underway when the iPhone launched. I don't have any firsthand knowledge of who blew off whom, but I'd guess it was Apple doing the blowing because that's traditionally what they do.
        rendall 6y ago
        I'm not sure that Apple intended to exclude Flash from day 1. I imagine there were difficult technical integration issues, never mind any other business interests. But once the App Store was launched and Apple commanded a 30% share of every single application sold on the platform, I cannot imagine why they would allow Flash to give away comparable applications for free. The argument has merit that Apple wanted a more precise control over user experience, and badly written Flash apps could disrupt that, but I honestly believe that was a secondary concern compared to protecting their App Store revenue stream.
userbinator 6y ago
Jobs' rant about Flash was really a good example of "shooting the messenger". Flash is an intrinsically more efficient format; it was designed back when 56k modems were the norm, and computers far less powerful, so SWF made use of lots of interesting tricks to squeeze the most of out the platform and be extremely simple to parse. Those who remember playing Flash games will definitely know just how much computing power they needed --- a fraction of that needed for today's "equivalent" with HTML/CSS/JS. You will never get close to that level of efficiency with HTML/JS/CSS, although they are certainly trying with things like WASM. I say this as someone who has implemented a significant part of a SWF player, including parts of the AS2 VM.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago

I distinctly remember this and partially believe the growth of the iPhone accelerated the decline.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

papito 6y ago

It's kind of funny how Jobs declared War on Flash, but it had to be done. It made the web back in the olden days much more interesting and even amazing, but it had to be killed off, for great justice and, look, it took over a decade.

adamredwoods 6y ago
The adaption of web audio took forever, something that Flash did rather well: https://caniuse.com/audio-api https://caniuse.com/audio-api

TwoBit 6y ago

And Flash was proprietary. And its behavior was opaque. And it didn't mesh at all with the rest of your browser/website experience, as it was an embedded thing.

adamredwoods 6y ago
The makers of the browsers (Apple, Google, Microsoft) didn't want to optimize for someone else's (especially not Adobe, not even Unity3D, if anyone remembers that) plugin. So WHATG and W3C made their own 'html5 canvas' that didn't truly get official until 2014 (but was adopted earlier in browsers). https://web.archive.org/web/20141106212543/http://www.cnet.com/news/html5-is-done-but-two-groups-still-wrestle-over-webs-future https://web.archive.org/web/20141106212543/http://www.cnet.c...

8note 6y ago

That's a generous interpretation vs Apple wanting a monopoly on deciding what apps can run on iphones Not supporting flash is the basis for the app store

mirthflat83 6y ago
No. Apple was pushing for HTML5. In fact, they were imagining iOS Safari as an app platform in the beginning.
colejohnson66 6y ago
Nope. The App Store wasn’t even a thing until iPhone OS 2.0 a whole year later. As mirthflat83 said, Jobs wanted an HTML5 future.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  > Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. — Steve Jobs, October 10, 2007 (three month after iPhone release) [1]. How long does it takes to create SDK? Jobs is too smart, he carefully creates narrative, he is playing with audience. It is just a show, think Freddie Mercury, I do not understand how anyone can take his words at face value. [1] https://gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-iphone-sdk-in-dev-hands-february-08-311881 https://gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-iphone-sdk-in-dev-hands-febru...

josephg 6y ago

The real problem wasn't flash games. It was flash banner ads. Lots of badly written flash content would (even on desktop) completely peg a CPU core. And it would do that even when the content wasn't visible (for background tabs, or if you'd scrolled past the ad). This is bad enough on desktop, worse on a laptop (where you care more about battery and thermals) but it was a disaster on the very low power phones we had at the time. It made the iphone's browser feel extremely janky and unresponsive, and your phone would warm up in your hand. People had no idea that the problem was that "punch the monkey" banner ad they had already scrolled past. The website operator didn't know what ads were being served. Everyone just had a bad time. Steve Jobs was asked about it in an interview once and he said he'd never seen flash managing to work smoothly on a mobile device. He said if Adobe could show it working well, he'd reconsider. But as far as I could tell, Adobe never rose to the challenge. I think android had flash working for awhile, but they eventually dropped it too. (Probably for the same reason.) On desktop, I remember having an option in chrome to make flash not play by default. That way flash banner ads just wouldn't get loaded. I imagine they could have done the same for mobile safari - but that sort of thing was never Apple's aesthetic.

duskwuff 6y ago
> I think android had flash working for awhile, but they eventually dropped it too. (Probably for the same reason.) Yep. Between the performance issues and interface hangups (touch screen = no cursor = no mouse movement events), Flash for Android was basically unusable for most applications.

oblio 6y ago

There is the pretext and then there is the real reason. Which is the same reason that Apple allows only their browser engine used by every browser on iOS, has blocked JIT (again, only allowed for their Javascript interpreter), has a neutered implementation of progressive web apps, does not allow alternate app stores or side loading apps. Control. Money.

amelius 6y ago

> Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. Of course he hated it, because now everybody is writing software specifically for Apple instead of for the web.

colejohnson66 6y ago
That’s revisionism. When the iPhone first came out, apps weren’t a thing. Jobs advocated for PWA (he didn’t want apps), but people complained about performance. So Apple added the App Store with iPhone OS 2.0.
- studius 6y ago
  > apps weren’t a thing Yes and no. iPhone apps weren't a thing until they were, but there were Brew apps[1], Symbian apps[2], Blackberry apps[3], Palm apps[4], etc. [1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for_Wireless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for... [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian [3]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_World [4]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_OS
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    True true. But I was talking about just iPhone apps

rendall 6y ago

> Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. Jobs wanted Flash gone because it was direct competition to the App Store. That's it. There is no other reason. Jobs could not say that of course, so he used his massive platform to assert that HTML5 was just as good as Flash, and that Flash was "riddled with security holes". None of it was true, of course, but Jobs had charisma and a massive following of True Believers, and so his frontal assault on a competitor was successful. An entire industry and platform destroyed so that Apple could not only control what games were played on its platform, but to charge for them Yes, Flash had security issues, like every platform and program and browser ever, but there was nothing about Flash that was uniquely terrible the way Jobs and his minions asserted

tinus_hn 6y ago

Apple wanted native apps, not the ‘one size fits all’ poor experience Flash promotes.