Comment by tesseract
2 days ago
Flash as an animation tool and applet platform was already on the downswing when the iPhone happened, though.
The consumer demand for Flash on mobile seemed to be mostly about video streaming, because at the time Flash was experiencing sort of a second life as the least-bad way to do streaming video on the web. In that context Apple's point of view of "as an industry let's finally fix browser-native video streaming, rather than being stuck with Flash forever" seems pretty reasonable.
Yes, I also think around 2008 or so the most widespread use of Flash might already have been newgrounds et al. I don't remember really ever caring for Flash on Linux though.
I do remember writing CMS backends for Flash websites in 2001, but that was the early time I think, before AS3 and really cool stuff.