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The final reason stated is the only real reason why Apple blocked Flash: they didn’t want any cross-platform runtime when it became clear they were winning. The

by pavlov 3y ago

The final reason stated is the only real reason why Apple blocked Flash: they didn’t want any cross-platform runtime when it became clear they were winning. They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable, but embarked on a deliberate program to limit Safari’s capabilities to hamper the web as a platform (just like Microsoft did with IE ten years earlier). In the late 1990s Steve Jobs was a big fan of Cocoa-Java because he thought a cross-platform language and runtime could help adoption of his company’s middleware product. In 2010 he was very much against middleware and cross-platform runtimes. That’s how it goes. The thing you’re selling at that moment is always the right answer.

camillomiller 3y ago
Well, that was the “Flash” that Steve was bashing here. Of course the tech for animation in itself was not a problem, but the proprietary reader was a massive s*itshow of security vulnerabilities. On top of that, it was so poorly optimized that it would have burnt through iPhone batteries in no time. The fact that not allowing Flash games would favor the then still nascent App Store certainly played a big role as well, but technologically Flash was inferior to what Apple was developing.
iraqmtpizza 3y ago
Funny that IE is the only remaining browser to still support Java, even if it's disabled by default.
jonny_eh 3y ago
> They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable IIRC, Jobs was against an App Store and pushed for people to install web apps on their home screen. Only after huge demand did they develop the locked down App Store, which was a far bigger success than they expected. I'd bet a dollar that is the only reason why they're as well supported as they are to this day. Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation#:~:text=According%20to%20Walter%20Isaacson's%20biography,work%20on%20the%20new%20platform https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st....
- AprilArcus 3y ago
  My read is that their APIs weren't ready in time, so "make a web app" was a stop-gap they tossed out to developers while they were preparing UIKit for its 1.0 release.
  - snowwrestler 3y ago
    There has been quite a lot of reporting on the origins of the iPhone since then, and from that work it is clear that they really did not intend to allow native apps on the phone. They had to reassign resources to make it happen in a hurry once they changed their mind, which resulted in shrinking and delaying that year’s OS X release.
  - miffy900 3y ago
    That wasn't the main reason though - UIKit v1.0 was pretty barebones not because they needed more time, but Jobs vetoed work on it for so long because he genuinely thought native apps were a bad idea.
    - tjmc 3y ago
      This is correct and has been forgotten. "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." -Steve Jobs 2007
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    Apple internal emails from the period have been released as court evidence. They didn't make the decision to create a native SDK until 4 months after the iPhone was released (by this time there was already jailbreak sideloading available) https://nitter.net/techemails/status/1400270458608664577 https://nitter.net/techemails/status/1400270458608664577 In another email it seems like before the device was released the need for a native SDK was considered only as a stopgap until HSDPA was fast enough to make web apps good enough (the original iPhone was EDGE only) https://www.techemails.com/p/scott-forstall-emails-steve-jobs https://www.techemails.com/p/scott-forstall-emails-steve-job...
danaris 3y ago
That's revisionism at best. Flash was a massive security hole. It was a resource hog. It was based on proprietary Adobe technology. It was woefully unstable and during some periods caused crashes frequently even on powerful desktop systems. To say that maintaining iron-clad control of the platform was the only real reason Jobs chose to block Flash is almost insultingly reductive.
- threeseed 3y ago
  Also people forget that Apple knows a lot about Flash. They would have had years of crash telemetry from OSX and so would have been intimately aware of its stability.
- Gabrys1 3y ago
  > Flash was a massive security hole. It was a resource hog. It was based on proprietary Adobe technology. It was woefully unstable and during some periods caused crashes frequently even on powerful desktop systems. Ironically, most of that is now true of web browsers (or should I just say Chrome at this point?)
  - danaris 3y ago
    Much as I dislike Chrome....no, it's not? Chrome is a privacy risk. It's not a security hole in the sense that bad actors can exploit its horribly buggy code and gain privileged access to your system (at least, not commonly that I've heard of). Chrome is proprietary, to be sure, but it's heavily based on the open-source Chromium. I'm not aware of Chrome being massively unstable on any common system—however, I freely admit that as I don't use it myself, I might just not be noticing the complaints of others because they don't show up where I would see them. ...Chrome is absolutely a resource hog. No argument there.
    - ncphil 3y ago
      This is an enormously important distinction: security ne privacy. Although you can make your own Chrome install insecure, by default it really isn't bad. Transforming it into something that isn't actively compromising your privacy is another matter. Flash, for all its "democratizing" impact (not that I agree it really had), didn't address either. Back then too few were seriously doing anything about security or privacy. As someone who lived through the Rise and Fall of Flash, I have to second the sentiment of an earlier post: I'm happier now being able to use a text editor in my work instead of an odd assortment of vendor specific tools. That, and HTML5/CSS3 has proven to be amazingly innovative and flexible enough to finally make the case for standards easier. Now all we have to do is keep the big boys from perverting these standards into monsters from the pit of hell. Man, is that going to be a fun ride.
snowwrestler 3y ago
Flash content also sucked on Android phones. If it worked great, it would have been an obvious competitive advantage over Apple. It did not work great, though. Everyone remembers this letter as the cause of death for Flash, when in fact it was merely the announcement. Flash killed itself on mobile.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Yeah. I was an Android user from 1.5, and remember anticipating Flash for ages, being very excited when I could finally download it, then being disappointed at how poor an experience it was In fact, the fact that Flash "worked" on Android became more of a curse for users. There was a period where many big organizations had nice native iOS apps, then threw a shitty webview wrapper over the wall for Android users, and they invariably used Flash for video streaming. BBC iPlayer was the one I remember loathing the most. It was smooth and sharp (for the time) on an iPhone yet blocky and battery intensive on flagship Android phones, if it worked at all
no_wizard 3y ago
We know from the Epic lawsuit thats not true at all, they tried in earnest to get flash working on the iPhone[0] and Adobe just couldn't get the performance where Apple needed it to be, even with help from Apple [0]: https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...
- theoldlove 3y ago
  That’s pretty vague 2021 testimony defending Apple (“We tried to make Flash work.”). It would be more convincing if there was contemporary evidence from 2007 showing how much effort Apple made.
  - silvestrov 3y ago
    Flash ran dog slow on macs compared to Windows computers. Windows was the only place where Flash ran well. So Apple already had experience with Adobe not taking Apple seriously.
    - saiya-jin 3y ago
      AFAIK the reason was constant juggling with codecs on Apple side as mentioned here, so all was rendered by software at the end on macs. The fairly tale of just Apple trying hard to make flash work on their hardware and Adobe sabotaging their own product on a major platform doesn't make any sense from business or even just logical point of view. Some companies, or even countries simply never properly acknowledge errors or mistakes on their side, it certainly looks like the case here (and I doubt anybody relevant could speak here due to NDAs or still actively employed).
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  I've been told the opposite side of this story from ex-Adobe employees on Hacker News: that Apple had asked for a mobile build and source code, but assigned the porting job to an intern who couldn't even get it to compile. They jokingly called it "Project Boomerang" because of how often things got sent back to them[0]. In fairness to Apple, I can only imagine what horrors lurk in Flash Player's build system. This was also in early iPhone days when most senior engineers would have been tasked with making sure Steve's iPhone demos didn't crash. So you could say that they tried to make it work but it wasn't a priority for Apple, in the same way that it wasn't a priority for Adobe. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36732094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36732094
HWR_14 3y ago
Apple was against Flash long before it looked like they were winning. At the time, Apple was pro-web app. I think that Jobs honestly thought Flash Player sucked on iPhones launch.
- sosborn 3y ago
  At that time flash sucked on desktop macs too. Seriously, it was awful on macs.
scarface_74 3y ago
Adobe claimed that Apple was stopping them from shipping Flash on iPhone. When Adobe finally did get Flash on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM. The first iPhone to meet those specs were the iPhone 5 - in 2011.

by pavlov 3y ago

camillomiller 3y ago

Well, that was the “Flash” that Steve was bashing here. Of course the tech for animation in itself was not a problem, but the proprietary reader was a massive s*itshow of security vulnerabilities. On top of that, it was so poorly optimized that it would have burnt through iPhone batteries in no time. The fact that not allowing Flash games would favor the then still nascent App Store certainly played a big role as well, but technologically Flash was inferior to what Apple was developing.

iraqmtpizza 3y ago

Funny that IE is the only remaining browser to still support Java, even if it's disabled by default.

jonny_eh 3y ago

> They only grudgingly accepted HTML because it was unavoidable IIRC, Jobs was against an App Store and pushed for people to install web apps on their home screen. Only after huge demand did they develop the locked down App Store, which was a far bigger success than they expected. I'd bet a dollar that is the only reason why they're as well supported as they are to this day. Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation#:~:text=According%20to%20Walter%20Isaacson's%20biography,work%20on%20the%20new%20platform https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st....

AprilArcus 3y ago
My read is that their APIs weren't ready in time, so "make a web app" was a stop-gap they tossed out to developers while they were preparing UIKit for its 1.0 release.
- snowwrestler 3y ago
  There has been quite a lot of reporting on the origins of the iPhone since then, and from that work it is clear that they really did not intend to allow native apps on the phone. They had to reassign resources to make it happen in a hurry once they changed their mind, which resulted in shrinking and delaying that year’s OS X release.
- miffy900 3y ago
  That wasn't the main reason though - UIKit v1.0 was pretty barebones not because they needed more time, but Jobs vetoed work on it for so long because he genuinely thought native apps were a bad idea.
  - tjmc 3y ago
    This is correct and has been forgotten. "You don’t want your phone to be an open platform. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." -Steve Jobs 2007
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Apple internal emails from the period have been released as court evidence. They didn't make the decision to create a native SDK until 4 months after the iPhone was released (by this time there was already jailbreak sideloading available) https://nitter.net/techemails/status/1400270458608664577 https://nitter.net/techemails/status/1400270458608664577 In another email it seems like before the device was released the need for a native SDK was considered only as a stopgap until HSDPA was fast enough to make web apps good enough (the original iPhone was EDGE only) https://www.techemails.com/p/scott-forstall-emails-steve-jobs https://www.techemails.com/p/scott-forstall-emails-steve-job...

danaris 3y ago

That's revisionism at best. Flash was a massive security hole. It was a resource hog. It was based on proprietary Adobe technology. It was woefully unstable and during some periods caused crashes frequently even on powerful desktop systems. To say that maintaining iron-clad control of the platform was the only real reason Jobs chose to block Flash is almost insultingly reductive.

threeseed 3y ago
Also people forget that Apple knows a lot about Flash. They would have had years of crash telemetry from OSX and so would have been intimately aware of its stability.
Gabrys1 3y ago
> Flash was a massive security hole. It was a resource hog. It was based on proprietary Adobe technology. It was woefully unstable and during some periods caused crashes frequently even on powerful desktop systems. Ironically, most of that is now true of web browsers (or should I just say Chrome at this point?)
- danaris 3y ago
  Much as I dislike Chrome....no, it's not? Chrome is a privacy risk. It's not a security hole in the sense that bad actors can exploit its horribly buggy code and gain privileged access to your system (at least, not commonly that I've heard of). Chrome is proprietary, to be sure, but it's heavily based on the open-source Chromium. I'm not aware of Chrome being massively unstable on any common system—however, I freely admit that as I don't use it myself, I might just not be noticing the complaints of others because they don't show up where I would see them. ...Chrome is absolutely a resource hog. No argument there.
  - ncphil 3y ago
    This is an enormously important distinction: security ne privacy. Although you can make your own Chrome install insecure, by default it really isn't bad. Transforming it into something that isn't actively compromising your privacy is another matter. Flash, for all its "democratizing" impact (not that I agree it really had), didn't address either. Back then too few were seriously doing anything about security or privacy. As someone who lived through the Rise and Fall of Flash, I have to second the sentiment of an earlier post: I'm happier now being able to use a text editor in my work instead of an odd assortment of vendor specific tools. That, and HTML5/CSS3 has proven to be amazingly innovative and flexible enough to finally make the case for standards easier. Now all we have to do is keep the big boys from perverting these standards into monsters from the pit of hell. Man, is that going to be a fun ride.

snowwrestler 3y ago

Flash content also sucked on Android phones. If it worked great, it would have been an obvious competitive advantage over Apple. It did not work great, though. Everyone remembers this letter as the cause of death for Flash, when in fact it was merely the announcement. Flash killed itself on mobile.

didntcheck 3y ago
Yeah. I was an Android user from 1.5, and remember anticipating Flash for ages, being very excited when I could finally download it, then being disappointed at how poor an experience it was In fact, the fact that Flash "worked" on Android became more of a curse for users. There was a period where many big organizations had nice native iOS apps, then threw a shitty webview wrapper over the wall for Android users, and they invariably used Flash for video streaming. BBC iPlayer was the one I remember loathing the most. It was smooth and sharp (for the time) on an iPhone yet blocky and battery intensive on flagship Android phones, if it worked at all

no_wizard 3y ago

We know from the Epic lawsuit thats not true at all, they tried in earnest to get flash working on the iPhone[0] and Adobe just couldn't get the performance where Apple needed it to be, even with help from Apple [0]: https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...

theoldlove 3y ago
That’s pretty vague 2021 testimony defending Apple (“We tried to make Flash work.”). It would be more convincing if there was contemporary evidence from 2007 showing how much effort Apple made.
- silvestrov 3y ago
  Flash ran dog slow on macs compared to Windows computers. Windows was the only place where Flash ran well. So Apple already had experience with Adobe not taking Apple seriously.
  - saiya-jin 3y ago
    AFAIK the reason was constant juggling with codecs on Apple side as mentioned here, so all was rendered by software at the end on macs. The fairly tale of just Apple trying hard to make flash work on their hardware and Adobe sabotaging their own product on a major platform doesn't make any sense from business or even just logical point of view. Some companies, or even countries simply never properly acknowledge errors or mistakes on their side, it certainly looks like the case here (and I doubt anybody relevant could speak here due to NDAs or still actively employed).
kmeisthax 3y ago
I've been told the opposite side of this story from ex-Adobe employees on Hacker News: that Apple had asked for a mobile build and source code, but assigned the porting job to an intern who couldn't even get it to compile. They jokingly called it "Project Boomerang" because of how often things got sent back to them[0]. In fairness to Apple, I can only imagine what horrors lurk in Flash Player's build system. This was also in early iPhone days when most senior engineers would have been tasked with making sure Steve's iPhone demos didn't crash. So you could say that they tried to make it work but it wasn't a priority for Apple, in the same way that it wasn't a priority for Adobe. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36732094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36732094

HWR_14 3y ago

Apple was against Flash long before it looked like they were winning. At the time, Apple was pro-web app. I think that Jobs honestly thought Flash Player sucked on iPhones launch.

sosborn 3y ago
At that time flash sucked on desktop macs too. Seriously, it was awful on macs.

scarface_74 3y ago

Adobe claimed that Apple was stopping them from shipping Flash on iPhone. When Adobe finally did get Flash on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM. The first iPhone to meet those specs were the iPhone 5 - in 2011.