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In the ad space, definitely, the iPhone killed Flash. But the games space hung onto Flash far longer. Right up until Adobe thought it'd be a good idea to start
by kmeisthax 1y ago
In the ad space, definitely, the iPhone killed Flash.
But the games space hung onto Flash far longer. Right up until Adobe thought it'd be a good idea to start charging revshare for certain Flash features... that were used by Unity's Flash cross-compiler... which just scared everyone over to Unity.
Both of these were downstream of Adobe not wanting to invest money in Flash Player. Apple had begged them to make Flash work but Adobe didn't wanna put money into something people could use for free. So they'd send over a build of Flash that didn't work with iOS's input handling[0], or they'd send over source code Apple couldn't figure out how to build, or whatever. If Adobe hadn't penny-pinched on Flash Player they probably could have gotten a few more years out of the platform, and also stuck around as an animation development platform for JS[1].
[0] More specifically, Flash Player didn't support the rollover menu detection Safari had for desktop sites. If you touch an element on a website, it sends both hover and click events, but the click events only happen if the hover event didn't reveal any new content.
[1] Yes, I know modern Adobe Animate can export to JS. It sucks. It doesn't support the Flash drawing model at all, so all your artwork gets rendered out at 1x onto a sprite-sheet. This was also a problem with the GPU rendering frameworks available for Flash, except HTML5 / JS apps also had access to efficient vector rendering.