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>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. Skipping

>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts. Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one. At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things could've been ignored or overcome. The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.

tomjakubowski 3y ago
Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did, which I'm sure helps.
- i_am_jl 3y ago
  If I'm not mistaken the solution was to make touching an element trigger the :hover state and the click action unless the :hover state changed the visibility of another element. If the :hover state changed the visibility of another element, then the click action was not triggered until a user tapped again. This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to determine whether or not a :hover changes display or visibility properties of other elements. As you've supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of ability.
- gumby 3y ago
  > more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to use for people without protected disabilities as for people who did have them. Whether this increased empathy for people with disabilities is an open question
jjoonathan 3y ago
That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control. As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.
- dimator 3y ago
  Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.
  - wsc981 3y ago
    Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure. But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now). It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay
    - pmarreck 3y ago
      I had no idea! Those games were amazing.
      - irvinej00 3y ago
photonerd 3y ago
Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to actually load Flash on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe could never produce something that wasn’t buggy crap. There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either. Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.
- xp84 3y ago
  Very true. In case anyone is too young to remember, in the days of the iPhone 3G, it was somewhat popular to buy apps which would use a real browser on a server somewhere to render a browser session, complete with Flash, and stream it to you. It was very handy for those of us who played Flash games and needed to check in on our game on the go. (Think FarmVille, Cityville, etc.)
_jal 3y ago
I don't think that wasn't the deal-breaker. Jobs didn't want Flash to become the de facto development environment for the phone. I'm pretty sure he always knew they'd end up with apps on it, they just didn't pull that together for the first release, thus the HTML song and dance. But if they supported flash, that would reduce a lot of the demand for apps later, and worse - it would be cross platform. So he used the other (still good) reasons - battery life, security, etc. to obscure the real reason - Apple was not yet ready to compete with it on their own terms, so they banned it.
coldtea 3y ago
>The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen. It's more about control and all the other reasons. Mousovers is a dead herring. They could still give Flash not to run existing stuff, but new apps, that would take iOS into account. And legacy flash movies and animations and games that just needed click and not mousovers would still work. To be frank, mouseover interaction weren't really that big in many (most?) Flash games anyway.
- acdha 3y ago
  Mouseovers were just the tip of the iceberg: fixed screen sizes and other desktop UI conventions, assumptions that you could just leave things constantly running rather than figure out how to do proper event-driven programming, etc. Yes, they could have tried to do a “Flash mobile” but most of the appeal was compatibility with the huge library of existing apps and users wouldn’t have been happy with that, while authors would have bristled at having to give up their favorite hacks. Flash was a fractal of bad programming and UI design, and there was no way to get that community to improve since Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. People wrote Click-to-Flash plugins to keep it from crashing your browser, every browser had to change their architecture to handle Flash crashing, the plugin & authoring tools had tons of performance, stability, and security issues – and Adobe just kept snoozing, waking only enough to cash the royalty checks, and claim the next version would be totally better. Another poster mentioned the hangs - which is very true - and I can say that the desktop Macs I supported had a high 90% of the crash logs show Flash as the culprit, not to mention almost every CPU / battery life issue. There were some great artists who produced neat work despite it but the only company to blame for Flash’s demise is Adobe. As a thought exercise, ask why Flash on Android consistently sucked – if they were trying to make the case that Apple should reconsider, they could have put at least one intern on making that seem appealing.
  - amluto 3y ago
    > Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. This is par for the course for Adobe. The other day I had occasion to try to fill out a PDF form using Acrobat Pro. I made it through about a page (painfully slowly) until I unwisely saved my work. Then I cursed for a bit, tried quitting and reloading, and eventually gave up and started over in PDF.js. Superior in every way. I remember when a major selling point of Acrobat was that you could save a filled out form, whereas third party apps couldn’t. Apparently doing so still breaks the form, and third party apps have gotten it right for many years now. Adobe seems to pretty much never care about their platform once they have market share.
brokenmachine 3y ago
I remember my old Samsung Galaxy Note (or was it the Note 3?) could actually sense when your finger was near the screen but not touching, for mouseover events. I always wondered why that feature didn't continue - I remember it working quite well, but IIRC it only worked in Chrome browser.
girvo 3y ago
That, and even if you somehow fixed that, Flash on mobile sucked. I had Flash on my Windows Mobile handset. It was horrible!

tomjakubowski 3y ago

Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did, which I'm sure helps.

i_am_jl 3y ago
If I'm not mistaken the solution was to make touching an element trigger the :hover state and the click action unless the :hover state changed the visibility of another element. If the :hover state changed the visibility of another element, then the click action was not triggered until a user tapped again. This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to determine whether or not a :hover changes display or visibility properties of other elements. As you've supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of ability.
gumby 3y ago
> more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to use for people without protected disabilities as for people who did have them. Whether this increased empathy for people with disabilities is an open question

jjoonathan 3y ago

That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control. As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.

dimator 3y ago
Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.
- wsc981 3y ago
  Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure. But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now). It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    I had no idea! Those games were amazing.
    - irvinej00 3y ago

photonerd 3y ago

Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to actually load Flash on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe could never produce something that wasn’t buggy crap. There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either. Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.

xp84 3y ago
Very true. In case anyone is too young to remember, in the days of the iPhone 3G, it was somewhat popular to buy apps which would use a real browser on a server somewhere to render a browser session, complete with Flash, and stream it to you. It was very handy for those of us who played Flash games and needed to check in on our game on the go. (Think FarmVille, Cityville, etc.)

_jal 3y ago

I don't think that wasn't the deal-breaker. Jobs didn't want Flash to become the de facto development environment for the phone. I'm pretty sure he always knew they'd end up with apps on it, they just didn't pull that together for the first release, thus the HTML song and dance. But if they supported flash, that would reduce a lot of the demand for apps later, and worse - it would be cross platform. So he used the other (still good) reasons - battery life, security, etc. to obscure the real reason - Apple was not yet ready to compete with it on their own terms, so they banned it.

coldtea 3y ago

>The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen. It's more about control and all the other reasons. Mousovers is a dead herring. They could still give Flash not to run existing stuff, but new apps, that would take iOS into account. And legacy flash movies and animations and games that just needed click and not mousovers would still work. To be frank, mouseover interaction weren't really that big in many (most?) Flash games anyway.

acdha 3y ago
Mouseovers were just the tip of the iceberg: fixed screen sizes and other desktop UI conventions, assumptions that you could just leave things constantly running rather than figure out how to do proper event-driven programming, etc. Yes, they could have tried to do a “Flash mobile” but most of the appeal was compatibility with the huge library of existing apps and users wouldn’t have been happy with that, while authors would have bristled at having to give up their favorite hacks. Flash was a fractal of bad programming and UI design, and there was no way to get that community to improve since Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. People wrote Click-to-Flash plugins to keep it from crashing your browser, every browser had to change their architecture to handle Flash crashing, the plugin & authoring tools had tons of performance, stability, and security issues – and Adobe just kept snoozing, waking only enough to cash the royalty checks, and claim the next version would be totally better. Another poster mentioned the hangs - which is very true - and I can say that the desktop Macs I supported had a high 90% of the crash logs show Flash as the culprit, not to mention almost every CPU / battery life issue. There were some great artists who produced neat work despite it but the only company to blame for Flash’s demise is Adobe. As a thought exercise, ask why Flash on Android consistently sucked – if they were trying to make the case that Apple should reconsider, they could have put at least one intern on making that seem appealing.
- amluto 3y ago
  > Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. This is par for the course for Adobe. The other day I had occasion to try to fill out a PDF form using Acrobat Pro. I made it through about a page (painfully slowly) until I unwisely saved my work. Then I cursed for a bit, tried quitting and reloading, and eventually gave up and started over in PDF.js. Superior in every way. I remember when a major selling point of Acrobat was that you could save a filled out form, whereas third party apps couldn’t. Apparently doing so still breaks the form, and third party apps have gotten it right for many years now. Adobe seems to pretty much never care about their platform once they have market share.

brokenmachine 3y ago

I remember my old Samsung Galaxy Note (or was it the Note 3?) could actually sense when your finger was near the screen but not touching, for mouseover events. I always wondered why that feature didn't continue - I remember it working quite well, but IIRC it only worked in Chrome browser.

girvo 3y ago

That, and even if you somehow fixed that, Flash on mobile sucked. I had Flash on my Windows Mobile handset. It was horrible!