Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it. Looking at how Flash turned out on Android, I think history shows he was right.

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.)

View on HN

>Jobs' position was they couldn't make flash run acceptably on mobile devices, so they never allowed it.

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.

I find the arguments convincing because they make sense to me. There's 0% of me as an iPhone user that's like, "man, I wish Apple had done more to extend the lifetime of flash."

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.)

That's the official reason. I've long suspected that the real reason he didn't want flash was because it would cut into app-store revenue.

They weren't supporting Flash long before the App Store was a thing.

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.

Yeah, but the app store was in the works by day one.

Was Flash on Android bad? I guess I never really noticed. I imagine it performed worse but don't those things fix themselves over time?

It's like OS X or Windows banning Electron Apps because they're horrible compared to native.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com