Comment by m348e912
15 hours ago
Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.
15 hours ago
Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.
The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%.
And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
> And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive.
One of his arguments, and not the most important one. Looking at https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F..., he says the most important reason is that Apple doesn’t want Adobe to be in control of a major API on iPhones (he buries that’s the main reason somewhat by mentioning it last because, I think, he knew that argument is more “because it’s good for Apple” than “because it’s good for our users”)
Yes, he mentions reliability, battery life, security, too, but those are things Adobe (in theory) could have fixed.
He also mentions Flash isn’t open. Again that is is something Adobe could have fixed, but I doubt they were fully willing to do that at the time
>Flash isn’t open
Angry proprietary sounds from a walled garden.
I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.
The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
First iPhone didn't have support for 3rd party apps. Steve Jobs even explicitly spoke about wanting to have all 3rd party things run in the browser.
Only when jailbreaking and custom apps got very successful, Apple introduced official app support and the appstore.
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I’m sure it was a combination of factors. One thing to remember back then was that Apple’s position was far more tenuous than now - Microsoft owned the desktop and server market, and the established phone companies were deeply entrenched with things like long-term contracts. Apple knew they had to execute very well _and_ that was coming off of experiences like Motorola’s chip business self-disintegrating and Microsoft playing cutthroat with Office and Internet Explorer, all of which left Apple’s senior management highly determined not to lose control of their platform. I don’t think anyone realistically expected the kind of growth we saw on the App Store as much as making sure they didn’t get squeezed by a more powerful competitor.
(To give you an idea of how bad it used to be, Qualcomm’s BREW platform launched with terms for developers like $50k per carrier per app to be listed AND a percentage of your gross revenue – not just the app, everything!)
The performance problems were very real, too, at a time when they were sweating every bit of RAM and CPU but the bigger problem was usability. Android kicked Flash to the curb, too, because while it was technically possible to make it run on a phone with a touchscreen was horrible — even the Android superfans barely talked about it as an advance because nobody liked Flash even if they had their phone plugged into a charger.
Maybe. But also Flash, on the mobile devices of that time that did support it, was a miserable experience. Slow and broken and drained the battery.
Apple didn't even have an AppStore in mind until people started hacking apps onto it.
Remember back in 2007 when Apple first told developers that to develop for the iPhone, they’d need to build WebApps for Safari? Well, that really was the plan. At the time, Jobs said:
The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash.
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
Jobs hated Adobe:
According to the biography, Jobs’ longstanding animus toward Adobe helped form his vision for Apple’s tightly controlled mobile environment.
In 1999, he was flatly denied when he asked Adobe to create a version of its popular Adobe Premiere digital-graphics software for the Mac. Adobe also wouldn’t rewrite Photoshop for the Mac’s operating system, even though Macs were popular with designers.
“My primary insight when we were screwed by Adobe in 1999 was that we shouldn’t get into any business where we didn’t control both the hardware and the software, otherwise we’d get our head handed to us,” Jobs said, according to Isaacson.
The two companies go back together even further. Apple invested in Adobe in 1985 and they worked together early on. But Jobs, who in Isaacson’s book comes off sometimes as vindictive and brusque as he was innovative and inspirational, told Isaacson that Adobe went downhill after founder John Warnock retired.
“The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left,” he said. “He was the inventor, the person I related to. It’s been a bunch of suits since then, and the company has turned to crap.
https://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/09/tech/mobile/flash-steve-j...
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It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
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I remember seeing stories about Adobe not being able to, or not wanting to, write a good energy efficient flash renderer for the iPhone, thus being another reason not to support it for Jobs (Adobe being of the mind that "Flash is so big, they'll have to support it" and Jobs proving otherwise)
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I would buy this argument if Flash as a browser plugin had been proven to perform well on a mobile device of the time, but it never was, on Android or any other platform.
Even AIR apps - think Electron, an application shell for Flash apps - were on the edge of usable on desktop Macs of the era.
> I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash.
Why not? Flash was objectively an awful experience on mobile, and the iPhone was entirely about good UX.
> I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.
Initially the iPhone didn't even have an app store. They wanted everyone to make HTML5 apps.
There was also the argument that "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash"
Flash had many issues for sure, first and foremost security. But I can’t help but feel sad of what was lost since then. The Flash era produced some really unique experiences on the web.
It was always fun when you were trying to find a contractor or something and got greeted with https://web.archive.org/web/20101028145116/http://industrial... .
it was about as unique as seeing corn in my poop sometimes.
Lot of it was bad, sure, but there was so much games and animation done by literal kids back then, because of how easy it was to create something with the tooling. Nothing even come close today, unfortunately.
The JimCarrey.com website was cool. That's about the only flash thing I came across that was though. Now gone as a site but recorded on video https://youtu.be/B1XZixLBurQ I'm not sure you can do those things in javascript to this day?
I suppose there's no accounting for taste, but from happy tree friends to xiaoxiao3's flash fights, indie animators made some pretty awesome stuff back then. My university experience included a lot of checking for new, cool flash animations back around 2002. Homestar Runner was another pretty big one.
edit: Space Ghost Coast to Coast was Flash. Harvey Birdman must've been, too.
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Sounds like you didn't experience all the awesome flash games and animated videos etc that people made.
And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling.
Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.
Those are all open web standards, though. Flash was a proprietary platform. I can't even run Flash stuff anymore because it was proprietary.