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You know, the funny thing is; phones got better. Apple's most of all. Batteries got bigger, processors got more powerful. Flash would have sucked on the iPhone

by 015a 5y ago

You know, the funny thing is; phones got better. Apple's most of all. Batteries got bigger, processors got more powerful. Flash would have sucked on the iPhone 3G; I'd bet it'd be a perfectly pleasant experience on the iPhone 13. Flash was a fantastic technology. It gave birth to an entire generation of game developers, software engineers, and content creators, and certainly gave many young people plenty of hours of entertainment. Are we actually better off because Apple killed Flash? Or, is it just that Apple is better off, having killed literally the only web-based gaming technology to ever see mainstream success and secured the gate for the App Store to remain the single source for gaming content on iOS?

Jtsummers 5y ago
iOS isn't even the most popular OS in the world. Flash died because other people chose to let it, not Apple. Desktop OSes supported Flash through 2020 when it was end of lifed. Android is the most popular worldwide mobile OS, and Apple has no direct influence on what it runs. And if Adobe had cared enough, they had enough clout to push Apple sometime in the past 5-10 years when the battery and CPU and GPU on iPhones/iPads hit the threshold that it made sense to return Flash to it. But browser plugins like Flash and ActiveX were doomed once people started caring about the security of browsers, and once Google (via Chrome) and others started investing heavily in JS performance bring it closer to parity with Flash and removing features (like video playback) from Flash's domain and making it native to the browser. It's also worth noting, that while Flash was barred from the browser, it wasn't barred from iOS once Apple opened up 3rd party development tools including Flash, which happened in 2010.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  > Flash died because other people chose to let it, not Apple. And because a better, cheaper, alternative came out: HTML5 + modern JS (powered by V8).

by 015a 5y ago

Jtsummers 5y ago

iOS isn't even the most popular OS in the world. Flash died because other people chose to let it, not Apple. Desktop OSes supported Flash through 2020 when it was end of lifed. Android is the most popular worldwide mobile OS, and Apple has no direct influence on what it runs. And if Adobe had cared enough, they had enough clout to push Apple sometime in the past 5-10 years when the battery and CPU and GPU on iPhones/iPads hit the threshold that it made sense to return Flash to it. But browser plugins like Flash and ActiveX were doomed once people started caring about the security of browsers, and once Google (via Chrome) and others started investing heavily in JS performance bring it closer to parity with Flash and removing features (like video playback) from Flash's domain and making it native to the browser. It's also worth noting, that while Flash was barred from the browser, it wasn't barred from iOS once Apple opened up 3rd party development tools including Flash, which happened in 2010.

jonny_eh 5y ago
> Flash died because other people chose to let it, not Apple. And because a better, cheaper, alternative came out: HTML5 + modern JS (powered by V8).