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> The reason Apple didn't support Flash was it was too good. The competition with native may have been part of the consideration, but this was far from the ful

> The reason Apple didn't support Flash was it was too good. The competition with native may have been part of the consideration, but this was far from the full argument. It was also much too bad. It was power hungry, as noted by others, because flash content tended to be driven by a million timers, but also, its interaction model was a disaster on touch screens. Even on desktop, one of the problems with Flash content was confusion about whether UI events were owned by some object inside the Flash widget or the enclosing browser. Plus, Flash was a whole universe of nonstandard UI elements that would have made uptake of the iphone interface more difficult. There is no part of me that believes the idea that "Flash devs could have coded circles around objective C devs." If the mobile app explosion had happened in Flash, it wouldn't have been an explosion. It would have been a flop.

WorldMaker 4y ago
The other perspective to add is historic: in the early days of the Macintosh Apple helped make Adobe Type 1 Fonts a printing standard and a deep OS level font standard and then Apple had a long relationship of depending on Adobe for binaries for Adobe Type Manager for core OS experiences. Adobe Type Manager had a long and interesting history, including and in particularly its huge share of OS-level, kernel breaking vulnerabilities. In OS X Apple paid Adobe to finally get the source code for ATM so they could do their own vulnerability reviews and own that code locally. Presumably at great cost. (Aside: Microsoft got caught in the same proprietary "standards" problem having to ship Adobe Type Manager with Windows for just about the entire history of Windows and then eventually paying Adobe enough to get to the source code and fork their own version of it that they could entirely own for vulnerability scanning while maintaining backwards compatibility. Also presumably at great cost.) It certainly seems easy to understand why Apple might have been hesitant to depend on yet another proprietary binary drop from Adobe as core OS service in iOS had they embedded Flash into iOS Safari given that expensive history already with Adobe Type Manager. (Adobe may have indirectly killed Flash just by that history/reputation of being a bad, expensive vendor with tons of vulnerabilities and charging Apple and Microsoft an arm and a leg to fix those vulnerabilities.)

WorldMaker 4y ago

The other perspective to add is historic: in the early days of the Macintosh Apple helped make Adobe Type 1 Fonts a printing standard and a deep OS level font standard and then Apple had a long relationship of depending on Adobe for binaries for Adobe Type Manager for core OS experiences. Adobe Type Manager had a long and interesting history, including and in particularly its huge share of OS-level, kernel breaking vulnerabilities. In OS X Apple paid Adobe to finally get the source code for ATM so they could do their own vulnerability reviews and own that code locally. Presumably at great cost. (Aside: Microsoft got caught in the same proprietary "standards" problem having to ship Adobe Type Manager with Windows for just about the entire history of Windows and then eventually paying Adobe enough to get to the source code and fork their own version of it that they could entirely own for vulnerability scanning while maintaining backwards compatibility. Also presumably at great cost.) It certainly seems easy to understand why Apple might have been hesitant to depend on yet another proprietary binary drop from Adobe as core OS service in iOS had they embedded Flash into iOS Safari given that expensive history already with Adobe Type Manager. (Adobe may have indirectly killed Flash just by that history/reputation of being a bad, expensive vendor with tons of vulnerabilities and charging Apple and Microsoft an arm and a leg to fix those vulnerabilities.)