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Comment by soup10 | Hacker News Reader

"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.

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> If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today.

Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe?

> Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem

iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly the opposite of a locked-in ecosystem.

Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now.

Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.""

""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"

You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here:

> Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time

Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) :

>... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008

You can also read about an actual iPhone engineer's thoughts on the matter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-r...

Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed.

Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.

I'm referring to were jobs went on a 1600 word rant about flash while not once mentioning the shortcomings of his own objective-c authoring environments and the many good things about flash that lead to the enormous community it had. https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

This combined with updated app review guidelines banning flash on iOS accelerated the adoption of html5.

Afterthought or not, apps quickly became the biggest selling point of smartphones from the second gen onward and many technical architecture decisions had the intended effect of locking developers in. Ports to android were often delayed by months and years if they happened at all.

You accused someone of "trying to rewrite history", when what they said was factually correct.

It's also been established that Apple tried to work with Adobe on addressing the issues it saw with Flash but was rebuffed.

The issue of Apple forbidding non-native code is one I disagreed with but has many layers and complexities. It's not nearly as simple as your implication that Jobs seemingly woke up one day and decided to kill Flash for no good reason.

> rant about flash while not once mentioning the shortcomings of his own objective-c authoring environments and the many good things about flash that lead to the enormous community it had

I'm just going to re-phrase what the poster above said - Why is it on Apple to evangelize Adobe's software (and criticize it's own)? That just doesn't make any sense.

>Why is it on Apple to make honest evaluations of Flash?

It makes a lot of sense if the primary goal is to make good technology and software. Is that seriously so hard to understand?

In case you missed it, he was discussing Flash in the context of a mobile device. There is simply nothing positive to say about it. Nothing.

Everything he did mention, from power consumption to terrible security and poor usability has since been proven true. I don't know of a single reputable technologist, or tech journalist, who would dispute that. Do you?

Here's a write up of why Flash failed on Android. Notice any familiar themes?

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-faile...

I can tell you've never used the flash authoring tool or you wouldn't be making snarky remarks about this. Nobody is disputing that the runtime had problems and it was never good enough for prime-time on mobile on older devices. But a blanket ban on Flash was anti-competitive behavior that means Adobe never got the chance to prove it could work.

Flash Lite worked perfectly fine on loads of ancient mobile phones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite

>Adobe never got the chance to prove it could work

Wait, what? They had years to demonstrate it working well on Android. They failed. Spectacularly. Why are you ignoring widely accepted fact of tech history? Are you implying that is also Apple's fault?

Look, if you want to discuss Apple being anti-competitive I'm all ears. I more or less agree. But using Flash as an example does nothing to help your argument. That's because everything Apple claimed about why Flash wouldn't work on mobile was later proven to be true. Everything.

Flash on Android was a disaster. Ignoring that fact to claim it could have worked on iOS (because... magic?) is nothing but revisionist anti-Apple zealotry.

Never let facts get in the way of a good Apple-bashing I guess.

Let me translate that:

Steve Jobs did not intend to let anyone else profit from iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser that would provide subpar experience.

They released a publicly accessible SDK in less than 4 months? And you believe it wasn't in their plan at all to allow anyone else to develop on it? They clearly planned to have a way to sideload app on it. Itunes already existed since 2001, it wasn't anything new for them. The only things they decided to change was to allow everyone to access it.

Flash would have been a way to allow everyone to access much more powerful feature. This is why they avoided it. The app store was an alternative that allowed them to keep control of it.

Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.

That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.

HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.

That is not performance, that is resource usage.

As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.

Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.

So basically any AAA game has bad performance.

There is a difference between "the most graphic intensive games available spin up my CPU" and "literally any game on flash spins up my CPU".

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