It was bad of Steve Jobs and Adobe to kill Flash (and Flex)
Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.
Flex allowed building cross platform apps with classic rich GUI. Now we need to do expensive rewritings in HTML / JS where UI programming is still not fully re-invented.
On the one hand, I agree that Apple nixing flash support on iOS seemed manipulative, unnecessary, and disingenuous at the time. It's part of a pattern of behavior from Apple I greatly dislike (unnecessarily failing to support standards under claims that doing so is superior--I say this as someone who happily owns Apple devices, as well as other companies'). It seemed premature.
On the other hand, the demise of Flash seemed obvious in the long run, with all the other standards and alternatives that were developing, and problems with the platform that never seemed to be addressed well. It seems like there's been a number of pieces out there lately eulogizing Flash, and although I understand its appeal, I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the idea that its demise was unanticipated. Even if Apple hadn't disabled Flash, the same outcome probably would have occurred. It just would have happened more gradually, with a more natural transition (which is important and why I have mixed feelings about all of this).
Rereading Jobs' letter from years ago, basically all of it stands solid.
https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Remember when basically everyone was using flash to play video? Would we really be in a better place if that had continued?
(The one thing that doesn't hold up imo was the desire to not allow native apps using 3rd party intermediate APIs. Tons of apps are made that way now, and it's fine. Jobs' worry about hurting the platform because of the 3rd-parties not picking up the latest native APIs mostly hasn't come to pass, because iOS is so dominant that there's a strong competitive advantage/drive to quickly adopt new stuff. But it was probably a reasonable worry at the time.)
I have a bridge to sell you too!
He took that position so that everything would be forced to go thru the app store. Flash apps can run on iOS right now, but they have to go thru the app store.
People wrote a TON for flash games, most of it was shit, but some was amazing and creative. Much like what you see in the app store now.
And think about it: If Apple's only goal were to push people to the App Store, why bother to build a mobile browser with good html5 support? Why add a special mode where you could add websites to the home screen as icons, and they'd show up just like normal apps, launching into full-screen mode w/o chrome?
Maybe I'm buying bridges, but I take Jobs' at his word in the flash letter.
(Though, no doubt! Apple does love having ultimate control via the App Store.
(Which, as a completely separate topic, is terrible. They censor the whole thing to a PG-13 level and reject apps for arbitrary political reasons (e.g., a drone-strike notification app, Gab).
(It's truly a shame that the most important medium of our time is run like a totalitarian state.)
I'm more inclined to believe that Adobe couldn't make a decently performant version of Flash for ARM that didn't eat battery power like a fat kid locked in a candy store.
It's like OS X or Windows banning Electron Apps because they're horrible compared to native.
Can they do this??! Please?!
As for Flash on Android, it was pretty terrible iirc. But at least it worked, and with most of the video content still being Flash based at the time, it was kind of nice to have until everyone switched off of it within a year or two.
Supporting Flash would have resulted in a system running, effectively, multiple independent graphic subsystems, each with their own font and web cache. Users would have blamed the platform for the resulting performance problems.
Also, Steve had seen what happened to OS/2. Once it supported Windows APIs, as good as nobody wrote OS/2 applications anymore, killing the platform. With zillions of Flash games out there, the same would have happened to iOS.
I could say Haxe and its ecosystem has saved our company from dying along with flash plugin.
On one hand AS3 was a much better language 10 years ago than JS is today.
But OTOH when I was doing UIs in Flash I always missed HTML and CSS.
The good thing about Flash is that you could make stuff that was impossible otherwise, but once HTML5 was here why chose Flash? It was slow and a battery hog.
Steve Jobs didn't kill Flash, it died under its own weight or probably Adobe let it die. Maybe Adobe thought investing in AS4 didn't make sense considering everyone was moving to HTML5.
It basically just an open source alternative to Flash at this point.