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Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash die

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping for touch input. Apparently they showed this garbage to Steve Jobs several times and he shot it down, and I can't blame him. Tragic, really. Even still, today, if Adobe open sourced Flash and Flash CS4 I think it be a huge hit. Homestar Runner and Newgrounds. Such an interesting space for creators. I can't even imagine the things people might create if it was still around today.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby
- chongli 3y ago
  Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things. They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and exist only to collect rent. When something requires finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
    oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to this day.. wtf
      - chongli 3y ago
        Of all the software to benefit from HiDPI, I would think CAD would be near the top of the list! Totally inexcusable!
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems. This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1]. [0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit. [1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also had quality options that let you scale the software renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING. Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still have dedicated JPEG decoders in them. And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood. In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU. This preserves vector scalability but it has other issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look polygonal. [0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We don't even support progressive download yet! But the alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for minutes on end.
- dylan604 3y ago
  If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than one has fond memories of is clouding judgment I'd say.
  - Bakingpotato 3y ago
    less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people entrusting logins and security to flash player to start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia designed flash to be a web based animation system, not a full web stack. The very fact that these things were attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people who were surprised when it came crashing down. all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    > If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were. The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.
    - j45 3y ago
      Truthfully though, what wasn't a security nightmare back then in some way? Doesn't negate what you said just actually trying to think of some positive rich media app technologies.
bsimpson 3y ago
Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died. I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.
- themagician 3y ago
  I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.
  - noduerme 3y ago
    Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
    - j45 3y ago
      > If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore. Is there a friendlier format that I can export from illustrator that imports better into Affinity? I haven’t had enough time to play with it and my days of working with the Adobe pdf spec are a little in the rear view.
      - noduerme 3y ago
        Unfortunately, PDF seems to be as good as it gets, which destroys any grouping done in Illustrator. (When reading .ai files, I'm pretty sure Affinity just reads the PDF data). The best workaround I've found is to "sequence" all groups into layers first in Illustrator and then deal with them as separate layers in Affinity. Tedious and time consuming. Also, Affinity's isolation mode is essentially non-functional, which makes working inside groups unreasonably difficult.
nolok 3y ago
> I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around. But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.
- weard_beard 3y ago
  cough coughMagentocough cough
  - IIsi50MHz 3y ago
    Magento? The…eCommerce platform that did a small fraction of what Fishbowl did?
    - weard_beard 3y ago
      I wouldn’t know, haven’t worked too much w/ Fishbowl. I was mentioning Magento as another product Adobe bought and is slowly screwing up so badly they’re killing it. They desperately want AEM to be the front end to headless Magento and cannot/will not put any effort into a storefront or services layer or anything MACH for fear of it competing w/ AEM. They’re missing the boat and in 5 years Magento will have gone from an eCommerce market leader to trailing the pack and almost dead.
- xp84 3y ago
  Suddenly everything makes so much sense!
readyplayernull 3y ago
> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe... I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Wasn't AIR just a repackaging of standard Flash for mostly internal/intranet use only, as the standard flash player was so full of bugs as to be significant security hazard?
  - pan69 3y ago
    AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash. According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Sounds like they pivoted to something that would perhaps be ok in less sensitive environments.
    - fenomas 3y ago
      ~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc. As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC). edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content, but it could display web content by invoking an OS browser component. So you could have a browser component inside a SWF wrapper, and the runtime could make the wrapper for you so from the author's perspective it was the same as supporting html/js. My bad!
noduerme 3y ago
I was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines at the time, and tested their frame rates side by side on the same interactive animations. Flash outperformed, but it ate more battery. I think in the end that was the reason Jobs decided to nix it. It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere). [0] https://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/?m=0 https://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/?m=0
- andrepd 3y ago
  Reading this thread has been unexpectedly depressing.
experimenting 3y ago
I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple. Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. The problem was pretty clearly on Adobe's end. They released a Flash runtime for Android in 2010; it was nearly unusable, and was quietly discontinued a year or two later.
- fenomas 3y ago
  > because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when (2010?) Adobe built a Flash feature that let you publish iOS apps. The feature went through an open beta and lots of flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted them into the app store, fun times. Then riiight as the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS terms to nonsensically restrict what language apps are "originally written" in - the source language had to be one Xcode supported, and apps converted from other languages were disallowed. Apple then removed the flash-based apps from their store, Adobe had to discontinue the feature, and a bit later Apple quietly removed the restriction. (Working from memory here, details are approximate.)
  - versteegen 3y ago
    To fill in some details (but IANAiOSdev): Apple first disallowed interpreted code [1]. (Wow, I had forgotten how much I loathed Apple for that.) Later in 2010 Apple loosened it to allow interpreted languages as long as you didn't download new code from the internet [1]. The exception was that you could use WebKit to run JS in a webpage in your app. I guess their excuse was security, so they could ensure the app they approved was the one you ran. In 2017 [2] they loosened it further to allowing downloading or importing code in some circumstances. The most important limitation now is that you can't generate executable code on iOS, which disallows JITs and makes everything other than WebKit a second-class citizen. [1] https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-license-term-chan.html https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-license... The old terms: > Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application. [2] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_developer_rules/?page=2 https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_develop...
babypuncher 3y ago
> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology. At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.
- vGPU 3y ago
  > because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology. And then Google amp came along.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
I just deleted my response about how I didn't think it was so tragic due to the security issues that plagued Flash, but I deleted it because I don't think my point about past security issues cleanly relates to yours about the benefits of open sourcing. I apologize if anyone attempted to respond to my comment and found that it was deleted by the time they submitted - that was not my intent.
pyeri 3y ago
They also had a competitor in the form of Microsoft's Silverlight, right? What happened to that?
- Aleklart 3y ago
  As usual, some vp ate another vp in executive jungle floor over chunk of budget and silverlight was promptly forgotten and corpo push “you need silverlight to run this” reversed after a while. Not if it was valuable software, but it can happen with everything eventually as it happening with windows server, exchange, sharepoint and other “essential business productivity” offers.
j45 3y ago
It's too bad Flash Lite which quietly was on so many devices didn't have the abilty to upscale either. At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps. At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel. Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity. If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe. Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.

Bakingpotato 3y ago

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

chongli 3y ago
Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things. They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and exist only to collect rent. When something requires finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to this day.. wtf
    - chongli 3y ago
      Of all the software to benefit from HiDPI, I would think CAD would be near the top of the list! Totally inexcusable!
kmeisthax 3y ago
The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems. This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1]. [0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit. [1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.
- cubefox 3y ago
  I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also had quality options that let you scale the software renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING. Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still have dedicated JPEG decoders in them. And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood. In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU. This preserves vector scalability but it has other issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look polygonal. [0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We don't even support progressive download yet! But the alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for minutes on end.
dylan604 3y ago
If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than one has fond memories of is clouding judgment I'd say.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people entrusting logins and security to flash player to start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia designed flash to be a web based animation system, not a full web stack. The very fact that these things were attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people who were surprised when it came crashing down. all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were. The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.
  - j45 3y ago
    Truthfully though, what wasn't a security nightmare back then in some way? Doesn't negate what you said just actually trying to think of some positive rich media app technologies.

bsimpson 3y ago

Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died. I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts they owned free-and-clear.

themagician 3y ago
I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.
- noduerme 3y ago
  Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.
  - j45 3y ago
    > If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore. Is there a friendlier format that I can export from illustrator that imports better into Affinity? I haven’t had enough time to play with it and my days of working with the Adobe pdf spec are a little in the rear view.
    - noduerme 3y ago
      Unfortunately, PDF seems to be as good as it gets, which destroys any grouping done in Illustrator. (When reading .ai files, I'm pretty sure Affinity just reads the PDF data). The best workaround I've found is to "sequence" all groups into layers first in Illustrator and then deal with them as separate layers in Affinity. Tedious and time consuming. Also, Affinity's isolation mode is essentially non-functional, which makes working inside groups unreasonably difficult.

nolok 3y ago

> I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Same way pdf does, because the money was in the authoring tools and they had the best ones around. But adobe mostly inherited flash because they wanted the death of macromedia, so they didn't really care about it.

weard_beard 3y ago
cough coughMagentocough cough
- IIsi50MHz 3y ago
  Magento? The…eCommerce platform that did a small fraction of what Fishbowl did?
  - weard_beard 3y ago
    I wouldn’t know, haven’t worked too much w/ Fishbowl. I was mentioning Magento as another product Adobe bought and is slowly screwing up so badly they’re killing it. They desperately want AEM to be the front end to headless Magento and cannot/will not put any effort into a storefront or services layer or anything MACH for fear of it competing w/ AEM. They’re missing the boat and in 5 years Magento will have gone from an eCommerce market leader to trailing the pack and almost dead.
xp84 3y ago
Suddenly everything makes so much sense!

readyplayernull 3y ago

> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe... I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed or ported, and so they started working from scratch on the successor of Flash: Adobe AIR, but took some wrong decisions and never got as popular.

justinclift 3y ago
Wasn't AIR just a repackaging of standard Flash for mostly internal/intranet use only, as the standard flash player was so full of bugs as to be significant security hazard?
- pan69 3y ago
  AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash. According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Sounds like they pivoted to something that would perhaps be ok in less sensitive environments.
  - fenomas 3y ago
    ~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc. As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC). edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content, but it could display web content by invoking an OS browser component. So you could have a browser component inside a SWF wrapper, and the runtime could make the wrapper for you so from the author's perspective it was the same as supporting html/js. My bad!

noduerme 3y ago

I was running a huge flash-based game site at the time and was able to test it on the dev Android Chrome plugin. The touch mapping was bad but there was clearly a way evolving around it (which worked well within a year for releasing AIR-based mobile games). To satisfy my own curiosity about performance, in 2010 I wrote my own JS/canvas engine[0] that was highly performant given the limitations of the JS engines at the time, and tested their frame rates side by side on the same interactive animations. Flash outperformed, but it ate more battery. I think in the end that was the reason Jobs decided to nix it. It is tragic, mostly though because the Flash workflow was so great for working with animators and artists as you were refining 2D game assets. Along with the whole Away3D and Starling ecosystems leveraging GPUs it was extremely performant in ways that JS engines still can't quite touch, and there's nothing similar in terms of cross-platform deployment now (pixijs and threejs are both great, but they aren't integrated into a package non-coder designers can work with and you still can't compile them to a single piece of bytecode that runs anywhere). [0] https://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/?m=0 https://strikedisplay.blogspot.com/?m=0

andrepd 3y ago
Reading this thread has been unexpectedly depressing.

experimenting 3y ago

I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple. Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.

duskwuff 3y ago
> Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. The problem was pretty clearly on Adobe's end. They released a Flash runtime for Android in 2010; it was nearly unusable, and was quietly discontinued a year or two later.
fenomas 3y ago
> because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when (2010?) Adobe built a Flash feature that let you publish iOS apps. The feature went through an open beta and lots of flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted them into the app store, fun times. Then riiight as the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS terms to nonsensically restrict what language apps are "originally written" in - the source language had to be one Xcode supported, and apps converted from other languages were disallowed. Apple then removed the flash-based apps from their store, Adobe had to discontinue the feature, and a bit later Apple quietly removed the restriction. (Working from memory here, details are approximate.)
- versteegen 3y ago
  To fill in some details (but IANAiOSdev): Apple first disallowed interpreted code [1]. (Wow, I had forgotten how much I loathed Apple for that.) Later in 2010 Apple loosened it to allow interpreted languages as long as you didn't download new code from the internet [1]. The exception was that you could use WebKit to run JS in a webpage in your app. I guess their excuse was security, so they could ensure the app they approved was the one you ran. In 2017 [2] they loosened it further to allowing downloading or importing code in some circumstances. The most important limitation now is that you can't generate executable code on iOS, which disallows JITs and makes everything other than WebKit a second-class citizen. [1] https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-license-term-chan.html https://playcontrol.net/ewing/jibberjabber/apple-ios-license... The old terms: > Unless otherwise approved by Apple in writing, no interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built-in interpreter(s). Notwithstanding the foregoing, with Apple’s prior written consent, an Application may use embedded interpreted code in a limited way if such use is solely for providing minor features or functionality that are consistent with the intended and advertised purpose of the Application. [2] https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_developer_rules/?page=2 https://www.theregister.com/2017/06/07/apple_relaxes_develop...

babypuncher 3y ago

> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. Flash ran like garbage on every platform it supported, which is the reason Apple didn't allow it on the iPhone. And the Internet is a better place today because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology. At the time I was a big Android fan, and it took me a while to come to terms with the fact that while my phone and tablet could run flash unlike Apple's products, the experience was so incredibly shitty that it was not worth actually using. I don't think I ever made it through a full episode of South Park on southparkstudios.com without the player crashing and me needing to reload my browser at least once.

vGPU 3y ago
> because half of it is no longer built on a poorly implemented proprietary technology. And then Google amp came along.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dumpsterdiver 3y ago

I just deleted my response about how I didn't think it was so tragic due to the security issues that plagued Flash, but I deleted it because I don't think my point about past security issues cleanly relates to yours about the benefits of open sourcing. I apologize if anyone attempted to respond to my comment and found that it was deleted by the time they submitted - that was not my intent.

pyeri 3y ago

They also had a competitor in the form of Microsoft's Silverlight, right? What happened to that?

Aleklart 3y ago
As usual, some vp ate another vp in executive jungle floor over chunk of budget and silverlight was promptly forgotten and corpo push “you need silverlight to run this” reversed after a while. Not if it was valuable software, but it can happen with everything eventually as it happening with windows server, exchange, sharepoint and other “essential business productivity” offers.

j45 3y ago

It's too bad Flash Lite which quietly was on so many devices didn't have the abilty to upscale either. At the time iOS came out, there was no App store, let alone a desire to let other runtimes run on iOS directly or indirectly like there are in some parts/ways today with web apps. At the time when Flash was prematurely ended, there was no suitable replacement for what it could do, and it kind of set of more than a few years of darkness of reinventing the wheel. Since Flash's ActionScript was based on ECMAscript (which is also familar to the Javascriptians), I don't think Adobe's replacement for FlashBuilder equivalent that rendered in HTML/JS/SVG reached the world, or if it did, timed well, or in any meaningful capacity. If anyone could create html equivalent tooling for what html could do equivalent to flash, it would have been Adobe. Few platforms came close to the promise of one codebase on many platforms like Flash. Lots of good hopes on the horizon in WebAssembly, Rust, etc, and more concretely with the next-curve techs like Flutter.