Hacker News Reader

Comment by soup10 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com