15 ms·

Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash”

198 points by max_ 5y ago

max_ 5y ago
Context: In the essay [0], Jobs suggested mobile app development on should focus on HTML5 (which is now called Progressive Web Apps / PWA) Apple has has been recently been rolling out anti-PWA practices [1]. Probably to reinforce their "walled garden". [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple... [1]: https://ionicframework.com/blog/is-apple-trying-to-kill-pwas/ https://ionicframework.com/blog/is-apple-trying-to-kill-pwas...
- shoto_io 5y ago
  Wow. I wasn't aware that Steve Jobs wrote essays. Are there more? I think this part is interesting, because it's still true: > Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
  - amelius 5y ago
    I don't think this is as true as you think it is. If IBM locked down their PC platform in the 80s like Apple does now, then we wouldn't have Linux nor BSD and everyone would have lost.
    - m463 5y ago
      Not that IBM didn't try... The original IBM PC had pretty open hardware and software, both a little unintentional. Hardware-wise they published everything so add-in cards and more could be developed. Sofware-wise they didn't hold Microsoft to an exclusive agreement for PC-DOS so MS-DOS could come out. Later they tried to close the barn door with very locked down hardware with the microchannel bus and IBM's own operating system OS/2. But it was too late... I actually think Apple and their customers would be more successful with open hardware. When they went from powerpc to intel with more generally compatible hardware, I think that was great. Now they're reeling it back in, and I wonder if they'll be following the same path as IBM did...
      - rob74 5y ago
        Apple already tried the "open hardware" thing once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Licensed_Macintosh_clones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Licensed_Macin...), and it didn't go really well for them...
    - ngcc_hk 5y ago
      Computer is always sort of open in that market segment. Apple ii, cpm and IBM PC. One can try (ps2) but all failed. Apple trying but still mac is sort of open and you can still run linux and windows on m1 sort of. Phone ... smart phone opened? From Nokia, Newton, palmpilot, windows phone, ... The question is whether the phone business model can bring it to desktop and conquer there. Wonder. I like my phone is walled garden and I can take risk of my collections of pc.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      Yeah, but Steve Jobs isn't responsible anymore for what Apple is doing today. If he would have done much different, I don't know. I also guess his main concern with Flash was, that he couldn't control the proprietary plattform. The flash player could have been improved ... but Adobe would have been still in charge.
      - dbt00 5y ago
        The problem was, essentially, a huge chunk of code in the middle of the browser experience that apple couldn't optimize for mobile CPUs, screens and batteries.
        hutzlibu 5y ago
        I know. Because Adobe could not bring themself to open the flash player (and still make money with selling their awesome tools). Thats why flash died, despite it was much more advanced than the web at that time.
      - livesinhel 5y ago
        > I also guess his main concern with Flash was, that he couldn't control the proprietary plattform. Oh, the irony.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - ksec 5y ago
    I think 9to5 does a great job and few on twitter looking through every single detail of the released email in court with Epic vs Apple. Those words of Steve might have been true back then. It is far from the truth today. At least Apple no longer sees selling more devices as their primary motive. Remember when the App Store started, Steve thought it would be about the size of their iTunes Store.
- ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago
  The essay rather suggests HTML5 as a better alternative to Flash for web development, not app development. Having said that, I haven't read the latest PWA situation on Apple platforms, maybe it is true that they are trying to prevent PWA from getting popular. If that is the case, I hope Google and Microsoft can take advantage of this shortcoming of Apple platforms.
  - irrational 5y ago
    It is true, but how could they take advantage of it? Your average person doesn’t care. I recently learned that more than 50% of phones in the USA are iPhones. How can Google and MS move anything forward on the mobile front unless Apple is on board? It’s not like you can run a different web rendering engine or JavaScript engine on an iPhone.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    When the iPhone launched there were no native apps, the idea was you could do everything as webpages
    - jpalomaki 5y ago
      That was likely because they simply did not have time to implement proper support for 3rd party apps for the launch.
      - Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
        When iOS (then known as iPhone OS) first launched, Apple were actively/publicly against opening up their devices to third-party native app development. They encouraged third-parties to use web technologies as an alternative[1][2]. However, iPhone OS 1.0 launched without encryption enabled (not sure why, iPhone OS 1.1 enabled it), so this made reverse engineering efforts a lot more straight forward. For end-users, jailbreaking was trivial, you'd literally visit jailbreakme.com and a TIFF exploit in Mobile Safari would automatically jailbreak your phone (or in my case, iPod Touch) and install Installer.app[3]. A reverse engineered SDK was used to write apps and made quite the splash. This encouraged Apple to make available an official SDK. I'm not sure whether it was public pressure, or just that Apple saw the ingenuity of what people were achieving with Apple devices. However, iPhone OS 2.0 introduced the App Store, and the rest is history. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/steve-jobs-apps-iphone https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/... [2] https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-iphone-no-third-party-native-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe
- re 5y ago
  > Apple has has been recently been rolling out anti-PWA practices [1]. That article is from a year ago and the author's conclusion is more or less "no, Apple isn't trying to kill the web; it's reasonable to have some time limits in place." Safari clears some script-writable storage for a site after 7 days of Safari use without visiting that site, but home-screen installed webapps aren't affected.
  - szundi 5y ago
    This is very relevant insight, thank you!
  - jamil7 5y ago
    Apple investing in its own development stack has become "Apple is actively crippling PWAs" for a lot of people.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Poor company worth $2 trillion and with $275 billion in revenue / $57 billion in profit can't bring its support for PWAs up to par with other OSes.
    - feross 5y ago
      Apple recently suggested [1] to Australian authorities that Apple can't possibly have a monopoly on app distribution since they have no restrictions against PWAs which "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". But they fail to mention that they control exactly what functionality is actually available to PWAs. And right now it's A LOT less than what is available to native apps. Also, most users are not aware that third-party iOS browsers like Chrome, Brave, and Firefox are actually just light UI "skins" on top of the Safari browser engine, Webkit. Apple refuses to allow third party browser engines on iOS. So this means that it's not possible for users to just switch to another browser in order to use more powerful web apps. They're literally prevented from doing so by Apple's policy to ban browser competition on iOS. [1]: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%20%2810%20February%202021%29.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%2...
- tannhaeuser 5y ago
  More context: "Progressive Web Apps" means Chrome-only at this point. The framing of this discussion in terms of "Open Web Standards" vs "Apple's walled garden" is just hiding the fact that's Google who're paying the bills and calling the shots on the web "platform". Sent from my notebook running Chromium (for webapps) alongside with FF for the extant web such as HN.
  - cerved 5y ago
    How exactly do you mean it's "Chrome only"?
    - tannhaeuser 5y ago
      Stuff only works on Chrome/Chromium if at all.
      - DocTomoe 5y ago
        As a Firefox user: I cannot confirm this. Which PWAs are you using?
    - coldtea 5y ago
      In that Chrome dictates future web standards, rushes ahead to implement whatever they want, and FF/Safari lag behind, to the point that some web apps will even say "runs on Chrome" only...
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Safari supports PWA.
    - formerly_proven 5y ago
      This is a statement with ill-defined semantics, because there is no such thing as a "PWA standard". "Supports PWA" means, in practice, that it supports whatever new API or feature Chrome introduced five days ago.
    - 5y ago
- slver 5y ago
  A bit overly dramatic, don't you think? "Apple rolling out anti-PWA practices" refers to them clearing local state after 7 days of no use. How is that going to stop anyone from having a PWA app? Web browsers have to prune their cache all the time, otherwise your entire phone would be just web cache. Local storage is intended to be cache. Nothing more. If you have something worth preserving beyond 7 days of inactivity, put it on the damn server and reload it when you have to. For the record, local storage is typically limited to 5MB. Users visit hundreds, often thousands of sites each month. They open links through social media to some random meme all the time. So we never clear those 5MB, what happens? Month 1: 5GB of local storage... Month 2: 10GB of local storage... Month 3: 15GB of local storage...
  - CodesInChaos 5y ago
    > "Apple rolling out anti-PWA practices" refers to them clearing local state after 7 days of no use. If they actually did that, it'd be crippling installed PWAs compared to native apps, since you couldn't persist anything without an account. However, from what I remember, they don't actually clear the state of installed PWAs for the primary domain, since the 7 days only count down if you actually open the app on that day.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    "Local storage is intended to be cache. Nothing more. If you have something worth preserving beyond 7 days of inactivity, put it on the damn server and reload it when you have to." How about the idea that not everything must live in the cloud? I like apps that keep my data on my phone. Or when you use your phone in areas with bad connections? Say an outdoor app, you have on your phone with lots of data you specifically wanted for this area. In case you need it. But now you have to remember to use it regulary, or you have to walk up an mountain to get parts of your old state again. There is a difference between temporary cache and intentionally saved data. Even from webapps. But this just means a further push to develope a "real app" inside apples walled garden, for a proper functioning app. (assumed this auto delete of all pwa cache is actually the case, and it would be allright with me, if there are exceptions for "installed PWA's")
    - 5y ago
- tobr 5y ago
  > In the essay [0], Jobs suggested mobile app development on should focus on HTML5 I think you should read that essay again. In the context of the mobile web, it argues for HTML and against Flash. In the context of apps, it argues for native platform technology and against Flash. It doesn’t argue for using HTML for apps. Edit: Quite confused about why this got downvoted. If you disagree with my reading of the article, could you explain what in the essay suggests focusing on HTML5 for mobile app development?
  - daveoc64 5y ago
    As others have said, Apple was strongly opposed to introducing support for native third party apps on the iPhone not long before this essay was written. Apple's preferred approach was web apps that you could "install" to the home screen on the device. While that functionality is still available, Apple has left that web app approach stagnant - not adding features that other platforms/browsers have, and reducing performance compared to running the same web page in Safari.
    - tobr 5y ago
      First, it’s not fair to say they “strongly opposed” native apps “not long before” the essay. Every iPhone model has supported native apps through the App Store. Yes, web apps was their original plan, but they announced their intention to launch a native SDK just three months after the original iPhone release. It took another thirty months before this essay was published, so in relative terms, at that time that original plan was nothing but a historical parenthetical. Second, this is completely irrelevant to claiming that the essay in question suggests developing mobile apps with HTML5. That’s just flat-out incorrect.
      - ksec 5y ago
        >but they announced their intention to launch a native SDK just three months after the original iPhone release. All thanks to Scott Forstall, he was the only one doing heated debate with Steve Jobs. And his word "HTML5 will never be as good as native apps" is still true today, whether it is on iOS or not. I really do miss Scott Forstall.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- planb 5y ago
  A bit OT, but can anyone point me to a few PWAs that are worth looking at? I don't means those "these tings are possible in the browser" sites, but real, useful tools. I just use one: "Brewfather", a fantastic home brewing (beer) app which can even use some Bluetooth API to communicate to local devices (Chrome-only of course). On my iPad, I'm using the app though.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - scambier 5y ago
    I use https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ when I need to do image edition.
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    It bears mentioning that there are a lot of apps in the AppStore that are basically PWAs in a webview wrapper. You may be using one every day.
    - scambier 5y ago
      Isn't that explicitly prohibited by Apple's guidelines?
      - ksec 5y ago
        Used to be the case but not anymore.
- waon 5y ago
  > HTML5 (which is now called Progressive Web Apps / PWA) This is clear gaslighting and is verifiably false. Progressive Web Apps is a Google thing, coined by a Google engineer[1] and promoted by Google[2]. The HTML living standard does not include a single mention of the term[3]. [1]: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-without-losing-our-soul/ https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t... [2]: https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ [3]: https://github.com/whatwg/html/search?q=progressive+web+app&type= https://github.com/whatwg/html/search?q=progressive+web+app&...
  - max_ 5y ago
    "Progressive Web Apps" comes from the notion of "Progressive Enhancement" [0] as opposed to "Glorious Degradation" And its a very old concept in web design. HTML5, PE & PWA is all the same thing. Just an evolution of standard practices & terminology. [0]: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/progressive-enhancement-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/progressive-enhance...
  - kristiandupont 5y ago
    >This is clear gaslighting Please don't destroy the term gaslighting. It means something very important and not at all what you are using it for here.
    - waon 5y ago
      It's subtle misinformation that's designed to change how people unconsciously perceive PWAs. When people bring up PWAs, they commonly refer to a particular set of APIs which has a tendency of mainly being a Google-driven effort. GP is muddying the waters by instead framing it as the HTML spec itself and implying it's official. If this isn't a clear case of gaslighting, I don't know what is.
      - kristiandupont 5y ago
        This is ridiculous. Is the term PWA also "designed" to make me question my own sanity, which is a key component in gaslighting?
- tarsinge 5y ago
  > Probably to reinforce their "walled garden". Or maybe because PWA is a flawed concept? At least that's my take as a consumer and a developer. As the sibling commenter noted PWA is also a Google concept, with corporate strategic interests behind, it's not as simple as it appears.
- maram 5y ago
  Pay close attention to the time Apple deleted the essay. Apple deleted the essay exactly a week before they stopped supporting Adobe flash. Thanks for HackerNews it's all saved here =) HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652461 My comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23654011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23654011 Another user comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655374
- EvilEy3 5y ago
  > HTML5 (which is now called Progressive Web Apps / PWA) Since when HTML5 became PWA?
slver 5y ago
That's the ultimate victory for Steve Jobs. His thoughts were so impactful, they killed Flash and made his thoughts not needed anymore.
- matsemann 5y ago
  Or Apple is backtracking because they want people to use their app store, not write HTML apps as the original said. Apple has done much to hamper PWA / webapps on iOS.
  - tebbers 5y ago
    Yep, deleting evidence while the competition lawsuits are in progress!
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      I believe this was removed sometime last year around WWDC.
    - simondotau 5y ago
      Setting aside the absurdity of the claim that Apple deleting a very famous web page could ever stop it from existing, you actually have no evidence that it was deleted from anywhere—only that it is no longer being served at its prior location.
  - arrrg 5y ago
    That doesn’t seem plausible at all since the deletion of this page will direct more attention at this topic than just keeping it up. I’m completely certain that there is some completely harmless explanation to this and I wouldn’t read anything at all into this (except that this post is very old and not a part of their website where they pay excessive attention as to whether old stuff is still up).
    - alpaca128 5y ago
      > That doesn’t seem plausible at all since the deletion of this page will direct more attention at this topic than just keeping it up. You make the bold assumption managers are aware of the Streisand effect when they're about to trigger it. So far reality has shown even management in IT companies falls for this every time.
brigandish 5y ago
> The page you’re looking for can’t be found. Perhaps it's just my set up, or perhaps Apple deleted Apple deletes Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Flash Essay”.
- pdpi 5y ago
  The link itself is to where that essay would’ve been hosted. The not found response is exactly what the title is getting at
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - brigandish 5y ago
    Thanks. I experience enough broken pages due to the inability of site to offer simple text without tons of javascript that I didn't question it.
red_trumpet 5y ago
Last version I found on the Wayback Machine is from 2020-06-14: https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MrLeap 5y ago
My intuition is that the answer is "uhh, no." -- is there any secure way to run untrusted javascript on a page? So that we could have those awesome newgrounds style wildwest galleries where people upload their weirdsies again. I've seen some synthetic namespace shenanigans that I've had a hard time breaking out of, but nothing that makes me comfortable. I know Flash never had a reputation for.. security, but Youtube-for-html5 games seems like it could never exist for my intuition. I'm sure you could get away with it on small scales, but anything beyond a person's ability to curate and we go backwards.
- derefr 5y ago
  The thing that would guarantee this, isn’t limiting the runtime (because you’ll always miss something, or be incapable of fully masking out something), but rather static analysis of the code to ensure it doesn’t attempt to use any of the dangerous features in the first place. It’s very hard to static-analyze JavaScript, of course, because it’s all late bound with a reflective runtime — you can get access to anything by building the right identifiers out of strings and then subscripting using them. WASM doesn’t have that same problem, though. It’s very easy to static-analyze bytecode-encoded WASM (as long as you don’t want “requiring modules from external URLs” to be a part of your Newgrounds-alike platform’s runtime surface.) It’d be pretty safe to have a site that hosts arbitrary untrusted static-analyzed-subset-of-WASM.
  - johncolanduoni 5y ago
    WASM doesn’t need any sort of “static analysis” to sandbox it in this way. WASM only gets to call the functions exposed by the script that loads the WASM, so if you don’t want it to access something you can simply not bother exposing it.
    - derefr 5y ago
      Yes and no. There are capabilities that you can only either expose to WASM or not, because they’re simple atomic functions in Javascript land. Dereferencing external Javascript-side objects by a passed-through key, for example. You could in theory write a “fat ISA-op emulation-shim implementation” for that WASM-side operation that has a bunch of Javascript verification code that runs every time the WASM-side op is called, at runtime (like how the Ethereum VM has fat ISA-ops that spend gas/check remaining gas in their impls.) But the resulting runtime likely won’t be performant enough to be a good host for games, if the games make heavy use of that capability, rather than just using it as a one-off boot-time thing. Remember, we want to mostly allow arbitrary code execution here—other than direct attacks on the user or the hosting infrastructure. That probably means that we want to allow the user of the WASM to require (a pre-approved set of) Javascript-side libraries and talk to them. For example, maybe the game wants to talk to Firebase using the Firebase SDK. It should be able to do that. But how do you allow the game’s WASM to talk to the Firebase SDK, efficiently, without allowing the game’s WASM to manipulate the objects of the Firebase SDK into giving it ACE in the host JS environment, outside its sandbox? Static analysis. For the case of a “dereference a key of an remote object” call, just validate that: 1. The string being used as the key in the dereference op is known at compile time (i.e. the dataflow digraph terminating in the WASM “syscall” to the runtime, begins with a load from the static data section of the WASM file; 2. The static-loaded string you discover through this method, isn’t on a blacklist of ECMAScript system properties. (If you want to do something that requires one of those, there’d have to be a separate, much-more-restricted syscall for that, maybe one that does have a fat impl.) The nice thing about this approach, is that it’s the server backend, not the players, who feel the sting of the overhead of checking the file for safety; and then, only once per uploaded program. It’s like putting the uploaded games into a moderation queue, where the “moderator” is a robot with good eyes to spot evil code.
high_byte 5y ago
Wayback URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple... Deleted between June 14-16, 2020
Austin_Conlon 5y ago
Adobe’s then-CTO Kevin Lynch was a staunch defender of Flash and argued here that Apple's approach to platforms was anti-competitive: https://youtu.be/Z512TwwyRWM https://youtu.be/Z512TwwyRWM. Years later he lead the original Apple Watch software project, and still does to this day.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Watch Yo Motherf*ckin' Enemies! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnjkM5TwTzM&ab_channel=C-Murder-Topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnjkM5TwTzM&ab_channel=C-Mur... Stay strapped cause the ghetto is so wicked now.
- oblio 5y ago
  Money. Power. Influence. People will say what helps their paycheck.
selcuka 5y ago
I don't see any conspiracy behind this deletion. Steve Jobs talks strictly about videos and games embedded to "web pages", not "PWAs" (which didn't exist back then anyway). It was and is still compatible with Apple's walled garden approach. He even says: > And the 250,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
- spurgu 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498 > Apple already provides some amazing documentation and tutorials for making offline-capable mobile web apps Sounds like a PWA to me, even though it probably wasn't called that back then.
  - selcuka 5y ago
    True, and the rest of that comment is: > but they're still treated by Apple as the bastard cousins of "real" iPhone apps. So no change in tone since 2010, which is exactly my point: > It was and is still compatible with Apple's walled garden approach.
auggierose 5y ago
I think the most interesting part is where Jobs says that most importantly, this is part of their philosophy to fight cross platform development.
jokoon 5y ago
Can't wait for the day the DOM will run smoothly on any smartphone. I don't know a lot about webassembly, but I wish browsers are studying the possibility of letting WASM access the DOM. Or at least, write some js lib that lets WASM have access to the DOM in some JS calls.
Lammy 5y ago
Also "Thought on Music" [DRM] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/
- ksec 5y ago
  Why did they delete it. Appel dont delete their Press Release. Why do they delete these blog/post then? It is still part of the company communications.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 - April 2010 (505 comments) also: Ex-Adobe Engineers on Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 - April 2010 (56 comments)
emdowling 5y ago
Reading this essay again (via Wayback), I'm struck by Steve's clarity. His writing is concise and simple - my favourite bit: > Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform. What strikes me is that he simply states Apple's goal - to sell more devices and make more money. He doesn't try and sugar coat it about serving some greater purpose, he just states what everyone knows to be true. It is refreshing, given how many business leaders seem reluctant to publicly admit that their goal is to make money. Secondly, it clearly broadcasts what problems they are and are not trying to solve, and where their priorities lie. Love it.
- m_mueller 5y ago
  I've yet to see an exec with such concise outside communication, from technical details up to the big picture, as Steve Jobs. Interviews with him are a master class in communication skills.
  - sumedh 5y ago
    I guess Buffett would be another example though his talks are about finance and investments.
    - i_have_an_idea 5y ago
      Not at all, Buffet rambles a lot. It takes significantly more effort to understand the points he is making. His writing style is quite good though and often very insightful.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "He doesn't try and sugar coat it " But I am not sure, if it is really honest or true. "Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps" Apple having the best apps meaning apple only has the best apps, meaning walled garden. Not PWA's that run on any good device for example. It is a very huge Apple boost, when some awesome apps are apple only - Apple wins there, but not everyone.
Nekorosu 5y ago
Just about time.
robgibbons 5y ago
"Standards aren't add-ons to the web. They are the web." - Apple's HTML5 Showcase, 2010 How far they have strayed from that visionary approach to the web. Apple used to lead the pack in promoting advanced web apps. These days they are holding the web hostage to protect their App Store business model.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bob1029 5y ago
Conspiracy or not, can we all at least agree that the open web is still a wonderful thing for all involved? As developers and technical leaders, it is incumbent upon us to ensure this ecosystem remains sound. The mobile business wants html5 dead yesterday because they can't be the middle man on access. When someone comes to your desk with a new app idea, maybe steer them towards a website instead of native walled garden apps. Many businesses do not require the capabilities offered by native applications.
Dah00n 5y ago
Oh God. I can't read HN comments on Apple anymore. It's mostly just two sides throwing well polished turds on each other. Of course it is better than throwing shit like on other sites but the end result is the same.
Solstinox 5y ago
It only gets a 74 when I paste it into Grammarly. Clearly Steve was a ho-hum communicator.
chall3ng3r 5y ago
Way before this letter, many developers including myself asked Macromedia / Adobe to rather pushing Flash as web browser plugin on mobile, focus on apps with embedded runtime. They realized it too late with AIR framework, but it was too little too late. It was a flaw with the vision Adobe had with Flash, and they missed an opportunity being leader in mobile development. Now Apple is kind of doing same for web, they've quietly removed that letter, as it now conflicts with what they preached in past.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
not a big deal. random page floating on a site that is clearly a main marketing vehicle. Not to mention Apple's increasing trajectory into being a media/services company and some of the text/concepts discussed in that post are a bit too 'open' for their liking these days. Will always be available somewhere in an archive/wayback

198 points by max_ 5y ago

max_ 5y ago

Context: In the essay [0], Jobs suggested mobile app development on should focus on HTML5 (which is now called Progressive Web Apps / PWA) Apple has has been recently been rolling out anti-PWA practices [1]. Probably to reinforce their "walled garden". [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple... [1]: https://ionicframework.com/blog/is-apple-trying-to-kill-pwas/ https://ionicframework.com/blog/is-apple-trying-to-kill-pwas...

shoto_io 5y ago
Wow. I wasn't aware that Steve Jobs wrote essays. Are there more? I think this part is interesting, because it's still true: > Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.
- amelius 5y ago
  I don't think this is as true as you think it is. If IBM locked down their PC platform in the 80s like Apple does now, then we wouldn't have Linux nor BSD and everyone would have lost.
  - m463 5y ago
    Not that IBM didn't try... The original IBM PC had pretty open hardware and software, both a little unintentional. Hardware-wise they published everything so add-in cards and more could be developed. Sofware-wise they didn't hold Microsoft to an exclusive agreement for PC-DOS so MS-DOS could come out. Later they tried to close the barn door with very locked down hardware with the microchannel bus and IBM's own operating system OS/2. But it was too late... I actually think Apple and their customers would be more successful with open hardware. When they went from powerpc to intel with more generally compatible hardware, I think that was great. Now they're reeling it back in, and I wonder if they'll be following the same path as IBM did...
    - rob74 5y ago
      Apple already tried the "open hardware" thing once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Licensed_Macintosh_clones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_clone#Licensed_Macin...), and it didn't go really well for them...
  - ngcc_hk 5y ago
    Computer is always sort of open in that market segment. Apple ii, cpm and IBM PC. One can try (ps2) but all failed. Apple trying but still mac is sort of open and you can still run linux and windows on m1 sort of. Phone ... smart phone opened? From Nokia, Newton, palmpilot, windows phone, ... The question is whether the phone business model can bring it to desktop and conquer there. Wonder. I like my phone is walled garden and I can take risk of my collections of pc.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    Yeah, but Steve Jobs isn't responsible anymore for what Apple is doing today. If he would have done much different, I don't know. I also guess his main concern with Flash was, that he couldn't control the proprietary plattform. The flash player could have been improved ... but Adobe would have been still in charge.
    - dbt00 5y ago
      The problem was, essentially, a huge chunk of code in the middle of the browser experience that apple couldn't optimize for mobile CPUs, screens and batteries.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        I know. Because Adobe could not bring themself to open the flash player (and still make money with selling their awesome tools). Thats why flash died, despite it was much more advanced than the web at that time.
    - livesinhel 5y ago
      > I also guess his main concern with Flash was, that he couldn't control the proprietary plattform. Oh, the irony.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- ksec 5y ago
  I think 9to5 does a great job and few on twitter looking through every single detail of the released email in court with Epic vs Apple. Those words of Steve might have been true back then. It is far from the truth today. At least Apple no longer sees selling more devices as their primary motive. Remember when the App Store started, Steve thought it would be about the size of their iTunes Store.
ZuLuuuuuu 5y ago
The essay rather suggests HTML5 as a better alternative to Flash for web development, not app development. Having said that, I haven't read the latest PWA situation on Apple platforms, maybe it is true that they are trying to prevent PWA from getting popular. If that is the case, I hope Google and Microsoft can take advantage of this shortcoming of Apple platforms.
- irrational 5y ago
  It is true, but how could they take advantage of it? Your average person doesn’t care. I recently learned that more than 50% of phones in the USA are iPhones. How can Google and MS move anything forward on the mobile front unless Apple is on board? It’s not like you can run a different web rendering engine or JavaScript engine on an iPhone.
- midasuni 5y ago
  When the iPhone launched there were no native apps, the idea was you could do everything as webpages
  - jpalomaki 5y ago
    That was likely because they simply did not have time to implement proper support for 3rd party apps for the launch.
    - Benjamin_Dobell 5y ago
      When iOS (then known as iPhone OS) first launched, Apple were actively/publicly against opening up their devices to third-party native app development. They encouraged third-parties to use web technologies as an alternative[1][2]. However, iPhone OS 1.0 launched without encryption enabled (not sure why, iPhone OS 1.1 enabled it), so this made reverse engineering efforts a lot more straight forward. For end-users, jailbreaking was trivial, you'd literally visit jailbreakme.com and a TIFF exploit in Mobile Safari would automatically jailbreak your phone (or in my case, iPod Touch) and install Installer.app[3]. A reverse engineered SDK was used to write apps and made quite the splash. This encouraged Apple to make available an official SDK. I'm not sure whether it was public pressure, or just that Apple saw the ingenuity of what people were achieving with Apple devices. However, iPhone OS 2.0 introduced the App Store, and the rest is history. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/steve-jobs-apps-iphone https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/... [2] https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-iphone-no-third-party-native-apps/ https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe
re 5y ago
> Apple has has been recently been rolling out anti-PWA practices [1]. That article is from a year ago and the author's conclusion is more or less "no, Apple isn't trying to kill the web; it's reasonable to have some time limits in place." Safari clears some script-writable storage for a site after 7 days of Safari use without visiting that site, but home-screen installed webapps aren't affected.
- szundi 5y ago
  This is very relevant insight, thank you!
- jamil7 5y ago
  Apple investing in its own development stack has become "Apple is actively crippling PWAs" for a lot of people.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Poor company worth $2 trillion and with $275 billion in revenue / $57 billion in profit can't bring its support for PWAs up to par with other OSes.
  - feross 5y ago
    Apple recently suggested [1] to Australian authorities that Apple can't possibly have a monopoly on app distribution since they have no restrictions against PWAs which "have the look, feel and functionality of a native app". But they fail to mention that they control exactly what functionality is actually available to PWAs. And right now it's A LOT less than what is available to native apps. Also, most users are not aware that third-party iOS browsers like Chrome, Brave, and Firefox are actually just light UI "skins" on top of the Safari browser engine, Webkit. Apple refuses to allow third party browser engines on iOS. So this means that it's not possible for users to just switch to another browser in order to use more powerful web apps. They're literally prevented from doing so by Apple's policy to ban browser competition on iOS. [1]: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%20%2810%20February%202021%29.pdf https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Apple%20Pty%20Limited%2...
tannhaeuser 5y ago
More context: "Progressive Web Apps" means Chrome-only at this point. The framing of this discussion in terms of "Open Web Standards" vs "Apple's walled garden" is just hiding the fact that's Google who're paying the bills and calling the shots on the web "platform". Sent from my notebook running Chromium (for webapps) alongside with FF for the extant web such as HN.
- cerved 5y ago
  How exactly do you mean it's "Chrome only"?
  - tannhaeuser 5y ago
    Stuff only works on Chrome/Chromium if at all.
    - DocTomoe 5y ago
      As a Firefox user: I cannot confirm this. Which PWAs are you using?
  - coldtea 5y ago
    In that Chrome dictates future web standards, rushes ahead to implement whatever they want, and FF/Safari lag behind, to the point that some web apps will even say "runs on Chrome" only...
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Safari supports PWA.
  - formerly_proven 5y ago
    This is a statement with ill-defined semantics, because there is no such thing as a "PWA standard". "Supports PWA" means, in practice, that it supports whatever new API or feature Chrome introduced five days ago.
  - 5y ago
slver 5y ago
A bit overly dramatic, don't you think? "Apple rolling out anti-PWA practices" refers to them clearing local state after 7 days of no use. How is that going to stop anyone from having a PWA app? Web browsers have to prune their cache all the time, otherwise your entire phone would be just web cache. Local storage is intended to be cache. Nothing more. If you have something worth preserving beyond 7 days of inactivity, put it on the damn server and reload it when you have to. For the record, local storage is typically limited to 5MB. Users visit hundreds, often thousands of sites each month. They open links through social media to some random meme all the time. So we never clear those 5MB, what happens? Month 1: 5GB of local storage... Month 2: 10GB of local storage... Month 3: 15GB of local storage...
- CodesInChaos 5y ago
  > "Apple rolling out anti-PWA practices" refers to them clearing local state after 7 days of no use. If they actually did that, it'd be crippling installed PWAs compared to native apps, since you couldn't persist anything without an account. However, from what I remember, they don't actually clear the state of installed PWAs for the primary domain, since the 7 days only count down if you actually open the app on that day.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "Local storage is intended to be cache. Nothing more. If you have something worth preserving beyond 7 days of inactivity, put it on the damn server and reload it when you have to." How about the idea that not everything must live in the cloud? I like apps that keep my data on my phone. Or when you use your phone in areas with bad connections? Say an outdoor app, you have on your phone with lots of data you specifically wanted for this area. In case you need it. But now you have to remember to use it regulary, or you have to walk up an mountain to get parts of your old state again. There is a difference between temporary cache and intentionally saved data. Even from webapps. But this just means a further push to develope a "real app" inside apples walled garden, for a proper functioning app. (assumed this auto delete of all pwa cache is actually the case, and it would be allright with me, if there are exceptions for "installed PWA's")
  - 5y ago
tobr 5y ago
> In the essay [0], Jobs suggested mobile app development on should focus on HTML5 I think you should read that essay again. In the context of the mobile web, it argues for HTML and against Flash. In the context of apps, it argues for native platform technology and against Flash. It doesn’t argue for using HTML for apps. Edit: Quite confused about why this got downvoted. If you disagree with my reading of the article, could you explain what in the essay suggests focusing on HTML5 for mobile app development?
- daveoc64 5y ago
  As others have said, Apple was strongly opposed to introducing support for native third party apps on the iPhone not long before this essay was written. Apple's preferred approach was web apps that you could "install" to the home screen on the device. While that functionality is still available, Apple has left that web app approach stagnant - not adding features that other platforms/browsers have, and reducing performance compared to running the same web page in Safari.
  - tobr 5y ago
    First, it’s not fair to say they “strongly opposed” native apps “not long before” the essay. Every iPhone model has supported native apps through the App Store. Yes, web apps was their original plan, but they announced their intention to launch a native SDK just three months after the original iPhone release. It took another thirty months before this essay was published, so in relative terms, at that time that original plan was nothing but a historical parenthetical. Second, this is completely irrelevant to claiming that the essay in question suggests developing mobile apps with HTML5. That’s just flat-out incorrect.
    - ksec 5y ago
      >but they announced their intention to launch a native SDK just three months after the original iPhone release. All thanks to Scott Forstall, he was the only one doing heated debate with Steve Jobs. And his word "HTML5 will never be as good as native apps" is still true today, whether it is on iOS or not. I really do miss Scott Forstall.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
planb 5y ago
A bit OT, but can anyone point me to a few PWAs that are worth looking at? I don't means those "these tings are possible in the browser" sites, but real, useful tools. I just use one: "Brewfather", a fantastic home brewing (beer) app which can even use some Bluetooth API to communicate to local devices (Chrome-only of course). On my iPad, I'm using the app though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- scambier 5y ago
  I use https://www.photopea.com/ https://www.photopea.com/ when I need to do image edition.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  It bears mentioning that there are a lot of apps in the AppStore that are basically PWAs in a webview wrapper. You may be using one every day.
  - scambier 5y ago
    Isn't that explicitly prohibited by Apple's guidelines?
    - ksec 5y ago
      Used to be the case but not anymore.
waon 5y ago
> HTML5 (which is now called Progressive Web Apps / PWA) This is clear gaslighting and is verifiably false. Progressive Web Apps is a Google thing, coined by a Google engineer[1] and promoted by Google[2]. The HTML living standard does not include a single mention of the term[3]. [1]: https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-tabs-without-losing-our-soul/ https://infrequently.org/2015/06/progressive-apps-escaping-t... [2]: https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ https://web.dev/progressive-web-apps/ [3]: https://github.com/whatwg/html/search?q=progressive+web+app&type= https://github.com/whatwg/html/search?q=progressive+web+app&...
- max_ 5y ago
  "Progressive Web Apps" comes from the notion of "Progressive Enhancement" [0] as opposed to "Glorious Degradation" And its a very old concept in web design. HTML5, PE & PWA is all the same thing. Just an evolution of standard practices & terminology. [0]: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/progressive-enhancement-what-it-is-and-how-to-use-it/ https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/progressive-enhance...
- kristiandupont 5y ago
  >This is clear gaslighting Please don't destroy the term gaslighting. It means something very important and not at all what you are using it for here.
  - waon 5y ago
    It's subtle misinformation that's designed to change how people unconsciously perceive PWAs. When people bring up PWAs, they commonly refer to a particular set of APIs which has a tendency of mainly being a Google-driven effort. GP is muddying the waters by instead framing it as the HTML spec itself and implying it's official. If this isn't a clear case of gaslighting, I don't know what is.
    - kristiandupont 5y ago
      This is ridiculous. Is the term PWA also "designed" to make me question my own sanity, which is a key component in gaslighting?
tarsinge 5y ago
> Probably to reinforce their "walled garden". Or maybe because PWA is a flawed concept? At least that's my take as a consumer and a developer. As the sibling commenter noted PWA is also a Google concept, with corporate strategic interests behind, it's not as simple as it appears.
maram 5y ago
Pay close attention to the time Apple deleted the essay. Apple deleted the essay exactly a week before they stopped supporting Adobe flash. Thanks for HackerNews it's all saved here =) HN submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23652461 My comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23654011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23654011 Another user comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655374
EvilEy3 5y ago
> HTML5 (which is now called Progressive Web Apps / PWA) Since when HTML5 became PWA?

slver 5y ago

That's the ultimate victory for Steve Jobs. His thoughts were so impactful, they killed Flash and made his thoughts not needed anymore.

matsemann 5y ago
Or Apple is backtracking because they want people to use their app store, not write HTML apps as the original said. Apple has done much to hamper PWA / webapps on iOS.
- tebbers 5y ago
  Yep, deleting evidence while the competition lawsuits are in progress!
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    I believe this was removed sometime last year around WWDC.
  - simondotau 5y ago
    Setting aside the absurdity of the claim that Apple deleting a very famous web page could ever stop it from existing, you actually have no evidence that it was deleted from anywhere—only that it is no longer being served at its prior location.
- arrrg 5y ago
  That doesn’t seem plausible at all since the deletion of this page will direct more attention at this topic than just keeping it up. I’m completely certain that there is some completely harmless explanation to this and I wouldn’t read anything at all into this (except that this post is very old and not a part of their website where they pay excessive attention as to whether old stuff is still up).
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    > That doesn’t seem plausible at all since the deletion of this page will direct more attention at this topic than just keeping it up. You make the bold assumption managers are aware of the Streisand effect when they're about to trigger it. So far reality has shown even management in IT companies falls for this every time.

brigandish 5y ago

> The page you’re looking for can’t be found. Perhaps it's just my set up, or perhaps Apple deleted Apple deletes Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Flash Essay”.

pdpi 5y ago
The link itself is to where that essay would’ve been hosted. The not found response is exactly what the title is getting at
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- brigandish 5y ago
  Thanks. I experience enough broken pages due to the inability of site to offer simple text without tons of javascript that I didn't question it.

red_trumpet 5y ago

Last version I found on the Wayback Machine is from 2020-06-14: https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

MrLeap 5y ago

My intuition is that the answer is "uhh, no." -- is there any secure way to run untrusted javascript on a page? So that we could have those awesome newgrounds style wildwest galleries where people upload their weirdsies again. I've seen some synthetic namespace shenanigans that I've had a hard time breaking out of, but nothing that makes me comfortable. I know Flash never had a reputation for.. security, but Youtube-for-html5 games seems like it could never exist for my intuition. I'm sure you could get away with it on small scales, but anything beyond a person's ability to curate and we go backwards.

derefr 5y ago
The thing that would guarantee this, isn’t limiting the runtime (because you’ll always miss something, or be incapable of fully masking out something), but rather static analysis of the code to ensure it doesn’t attempt to use any of the dangerous features in the first place. It’s very hard to static-analyze JavaScript, of course, because it’s all late bound with a reflective runtime — you can get access to anything by building the right identifiers out of strings and then subscripting using them. WASM doesn’t have that same problem, though. It’s very easy to static-analyze bytecode-encoded WASM (as long as you don’t want “requiring modules from external URLs” to be a part of your Newgrounds-alike platform’s runtime surface.) It’d be pretty safe to have a site that hosts arbitrary untrusted static-analyzed-subset-of-WASM.
- johncolanduoni 5y ago
  WASM doesn’t need any sort of “static analysis” to sandbox it in this way. WASM only gets to call the functions exposed by the script that loads the WASM, so if you don’t want it to access something you can simply not bother exposing it.
  - derefr 5y ago
    Yes and no. There are capabilities that you can only either expose to WASM or not, because they’re simple atomic functions in Javascript land. Dereferencing external Javascript-side objects by a passed-through key, for example. You could in theory write a “fat ISA-op emulation-shim implementation” for that WASM-side operation that has a bunch of Javascript verification code that runs every time the WASM-side op is called, at runtime (like how the Ethereum VM has fat ISA-ops that spend gas/check remaining gas in their impls.) But the resulting runtime likely won’t be performant enough to be a good host for games, if the games make heavy use of that capability, rather than just using it as a one-off boot-time thing. Remember, we want to mostly allow arbitrary code execution here—other than direct attacks on the user or the hosting infrastructure. That probably means that we want to allow the user of the WASM to require (a pre-approved set of) Javascript-side libraries and talk to them. For example, maybe the game wants to talk to Firebase using the Firebase SDK. It should be able to do that. But how do you allow the game’s WASM to talk to the Firebase SDK, efficiently, without allowing the game’s WASM to manipulate the objects of the Firebase SDK into giving it ACE in the host JS environment, outside its sandbox? Static analysis. For the case of a “dereference a key of an remote object” call, just validate that: 1. The string being used as the key in the dereference op is known at compile time (i.e. the dataflow digraph terminating in the WASM “syscall” to the runtime, begins with a load from the static data section of the WASM file; 2. The static-loaded string you discover through this method, isn’t on a blacklist of ECMAScript system properties. (If you want to do something that requires one of those, there’d have to be a separate, much-more-restricted syscall for that, maybe one that does have a fat impl.) The nice thing about this approach, is that it’s the server backend, not the players, who feel the sting of the overhead of checking the file for safety; and then, only once per uploaded program. It’s like putting the uploaded games into a moderation queue, where the “moderator” is a robot with good eyes to spot evil code.

high_byte 5y ago

Wayback URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200614182254/https://www.apple... Deleted between June 14-16, 2020

Austin_Conlon 5y ago

Adobe’s then-CTO Kevin Lynch was a staunch defender of Flash and argued here that Apple's approach to platforms was anti-competitive: https://youtu.be/Z512TwwyRWM https://youtu.be/Z512TwwyRWM. Years later he lead the original Apple Watch software project, and still does to this day.

DonHopkins 5y ago
Watch Yo Motherf*ckin' Enemies! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnjkM5TwTzM&ab_channel=C-Murder-Topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnjkM5TwTzM&ab_channel=C-Mur... Stay strapped cause the ghetto is so wicked now.
oblio 5y ago
Money. Power. Influence. People will say what helps their paycheck.

selcuka 5y ago

I don't see any conspiracy behind this deletion. Steve Jobs talks strictly about videos and games embedded to "web pages", not "PWAs" (which didn't exist back then anyway). It was and is still compatible with Apple's walled garden approach. He even says: > And the 250,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.

spurgu 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304498 > Apple already provides some amazing documentation and tutorials for making offline-capable mobile web apps Sounds like a PWA to me, even though it probably wasn't called that back then.
- selcuka 5y ago
  True, and the rest of that comment is: > but they're still treated by Apple as the bastard cousins of "real" iPhone apps. So no change in tone since 2010, which is exactly my point: > It was and is still compatible with Apple's walled garden approach.

auggierose 5y ago

I think the most interesting part is where Jobs says that most importantly, this is part of their philosophy to fight cross platform development.

jokoon 5y ago

Can't wait for the day the DOM will run smoothly on any smartphone. I don't know a lot about webassembly, but I wish browsers are studying the possibility of letting WASM access the DOM. Or at least, write some js lib that lets WASM have access to the DOM in some JS calls.

Lammy 5y ago

Also "Thought on Music" [DRM] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/

ksec 5y ago
Why did they delete it. Appel dont delete their Press Release. Why do they delete these blog/post then? It is still part of the company communications.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 - April 2010 (505 comments) also: Ex-Adobe Engineers on Thoughts on Flash - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1308788 - April 2010 (56 comments)

emdowling 5y ago

Reading this essay again (via Wayback), I'm struck by Steve's clarity. His writing is concise and simple - my favourite bit: > Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform. What strikes me is that he simply states Apple's goal - to sell more devices and make more money. He doesn't try and sugar coat it about serving some greater purpose, he just states what everyone knows to be true. It is refreshing, given how many business leaders seem reluctant to publicly admit that their goal is to make money. Secondly, it clearly broadcasts what problems they are and are not trying to solve, and where their priorities lie. Love it.

m_mueller 5y ago
I've yet to see an exec with such concise outside communication, from technical details up to the big picture, as Steve Jobs. Interviews with him are a master class in communication skills.
- sumedh 5y ago
  I guess Buffett would be another example though his talks are about finance and investments.
  - i_have_an_idea 5y ago
    Not at all, Buffet rambles a lot. It takes significantly more effort to understand the points he is making. His writing style is quite good though and often very insightful.
hutzlibu 5y ago
"He doesn't try and sugar coat it " But I am not sure, if it is really honest or true. "Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps" Apple having the best apps meaning apple only has the best apps, meaning walled garden. Not PWA's that run on any good device for example. It is a very huge Apple boost, when some awesome apps are apple only - Apple wins there, but not everyone.

Nekorosu 5y ago

Just about time.

robgibbons 5y ago

"Standards aren't add-ons to the web. They are the web." - Apple's HTML5 Showcase, 2010 How far they have strayed from that visionary approach to the web. Apple used to lead the pack in promoting advanced web apps. These days they are holding the web hostage to protect their App Store business model.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bob1029 5y ago

Conspiracy or not, can we all at least agree that the open web is still a wonderful thing for all involved? As developers and technical leaders, it is incumbent upon us to ensure this ecosystem remains sound. The mobile business wants html5 dead yesterday because they can't be the middle man on access. When someone comes to your desk with a new app idea, maybe steer them towards a website instead of native walled garden apps. Many businesses do not require the capabilities offered by native applications.

Dah00n 5y ago

Oh God. I can't read HN comments on Apple anymore. It's mostly just two sides throwing well polished turds on each other. Of course it is better than throwing shit like on other sites but the end result is the same.

Solstinox 5y ago

It only gets a 74 when I paste it into Grammarly. Clearly Steve was a ho-hum communicator.

chall3ng3r 5y ago

Way before this letter, many developers including myself asked Macromedia / Adobe to rather pushing Flash as web browser plugin on mobile, focus on apps with embedded runtime. They realized it too late with AIR framework, but it was too little too late. It was a flaw with the vision Adobe had with Flash, and they missed an opportunity being leader in mobile development. Now Apple is kind of doing same for web, they've quietly removed that letter, as it now conflicts with what they preached in past.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

not a big deal. random page floating on a site that is clearly a main marketing vehicle. Not to mention Apple's increasing trajectory into being a media/services company and some of the text/concepts discussed in that post are a bit too 'open' for their liking these days. Will always be available somewhere in an archive/wayback