In the Linux / programming world Flash was a pariah that didn't conform to their standards. But it was booming for creatives and end-users. In 2010, almost all websites used Flash video and Flash gaming was exploding on Facebook. (Apple had to fake their Keynote to demonstrate the iPhone could view the "entire internet.")
Security complaints are a weak argument: both Apple and Google have had security issues on their proprietary platforms. (I'll concede Adobe was a very poor steward.)
Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition. The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look weak. The iPhone business model depends on consumer lock-down, so making Flash compatible was counter-productive.
Performance, performance, performance. Battery life matters. Smooth animations matter.
People seem awfully sure Apple's anti-Flash move was 100% motivated by platform-building and 0% by perf. I'm not so sure it was 100%/0%, because I actually saw how shockingly bad Flash perf was, and I saw how big Apple's perf push was at the time.
One time (2010-ish?) I accidentally left SpinControl.app open after a dev session for ~1 week. SpinControl was an app that would automatically dump a stack trace whenever any application failed to drain its event queue for more than a few seconds and beachballed. Super handy. In any case, when I came back to development and noticed SpinControl, I was surprised to find that 100% of the hundreds of stack traces collected after my development session involved flash. Not 99%, not N-1, literally 100%. WebKit was finding its way into different applications so the symptoms weren't limited to Safari, but I still suspected that I had a filter enabled or something. Surely Flash couldn't have accounted for 100% of my beachballs? I triggered a Mail.app reindex, and sure enough, a stack trace popped up in SpinControl, this time in sqlite, as expected. It wasn't an instrumentation problem. Flash had literally been 100% responsible for all of my beachballs over the past week. Crazy.
This was around the time that Apple started to push developers away from APIs that made it impossible for Apple to aggregate background thread wakeup events to save battery life. In other words: they were willing to sacrifice goodwill to obtain perf.
I'll grant you that platform considerations likely played a big role in Apple's decision, but also remember that Flash was literally the single largest performance-limiting factor when it came to desktop freezes and battery life at the time, and that probably played a role too.
There is a pretty good argument that it was 0%/100%. It isn't like there is anything threatening to Apple that Flash could do that isn't theoretically mimic-able on iOS using Safari.
It was literally the official solution for DRM video on the platform.
It didn't have amazing performance, but it did just about play DRM video and Google didn't really get native Widevine support working for several years.
It's certainly a valid reading that Apple knew video providers couldn't stop using DRM (they were contractually required to), and therefore would have to distribute using the App Store rather than the browser to get a DRM solution that worked in the absence of Flash, and therefore Apple could attempt to extract 30% of their revenue.
No. Flash was too resource intensive to work on any mobile devices. Flash on Android was an utter disaster. It ate through your battery life, was unusably slow and couldn't even properly format Flash content for mobile, touch-based devices. As the world moved to a primarily mobile-based computing environment, Flash's death was all but inevitable unless Adobe could do something to rectify these issues.
No, flash in itself was quite efficient. But many flash games were just badly programmed. (as the IDE made game making easy, even for very beginner programmers)
No, Flash Lite ran on significantly-less-powerful feature phones. (Remember, in the early days of the iPhone, Flash was desktop-only.[1])
> Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition.
You speak as if Jobs instigated this when in reality, this was a response to Adobe holding Jobs' platforms hostage for a long time, and in many ways. Flash's ongoing instability and inefficiency on MacOS was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs/: "Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS," Luh said. "It wasn't designed with that in mind at all."
I've seen Flash-based feature phones do all kinds of things that desktop Flash struggled to do on (then-contemporary) desktop PCs. I can only conclude that Flash Lite had a significantly different codebase than desktop Flash, with very different performance characteristics.
Just because "Flash could do it on a feature phone" doesn't mean that a smartphone could keep up with the full Flash plugin. Look at the performance disaster that Flash on Android was.
I recall it a bit differently. By December 2006, Adobe claimed that Flash Lite had shipped on 220 million devices[1].
That was probably the apex, though — by 2010, it was all over.
> Web content was almost exclusively full-on Flash.
Yes, always IIRC. Flash Lite content wasn't delivered via the web.
"With the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, Apple declared war against mobile Flash. Apple is supporting HTML5 and its efforts have influenced the online video landscape significantly. Many major websites are starting to use HTML5, and video players such as Brightcove are serving up HTML5 videos for devices not compliant with Flash. Separately, Apple has worked with companies like YouTube to produce iPhone-compatible versions of their sites."
- https://www.wired.com/2010/06/adobe-releases-flash-player-10...
"Instigate" would mean that Jobs started this fight, but this action was one of Jobs' last salvos in a rivalry that started long before iPhone.
To over-simplify, Jobs never forgot Adobe's threats to abandon the Mac when times were tough and Apple needed them most. IMO, it was that relationship which taught Apple that it must control as much of their technology stack as possible. In that context, finally being able to kick Flash off of their platforms must've been both a great joy, and a great relief.
Edit: I guess the project to run Flash Lite on Sony-Ericsson was called Project Capuchin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5He1Wxl-Q
In that case, it makes sense to move either farther up the stack to design (or even out of the "stack", to more pure design) or down the stack to where it's more stable, at the systems level.
How is that I could play videos smoothly in Windows 95 but ten years later the same video at a lower resolution made a newer computer crawl? The answer is Flash.
I don't care if other people wanted Flash games. I hated Flash video and celebrated every little bit of its demise.
I'm not saying you are entirely wrong about consumer lock down, but for various reasons, consumer lock down can be objectively better for the developer and user experience, and it is easier to move fast when you have fewer dependencies at play.
This broadly went away when graphics cards started integrating PlayReady in the chipset, though we did eventually power through it for software encrypted video like EME protected videos in Chrome for Windows.
I am really glad HTML 5 has matured to the point that it has. Not having to have an entirely separate runtime environment running in the browser window makes things so much more stable than before. Now, if only we could figure out a way to make having lots of tabs not be painful, and maybe get a bit of a handle on memory usage, I think I might very well be out of things to complain about in terms of basic browser usability. ;)
The problem is that both web applications and native applications are "applications." The rest are either implementation details or politics of the platform owners (Apple) and 3rd party app developers. I say this as someone who enjoys writing Swift.
I distinctly remember a general dislike by people who didn't know the name of the technology, because parts of my highschool's homepage were implemented in Flash, and it didn't load right. In 2005-2006. They recognized it primarily because it was slow and messed with the right-click context menu.
"Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't created any alternative that kids would love as much.
It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it, pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.
Nowadays the technology has gone to other places and more than ever artists are locked out of the workflow and reliant on programmers to implement even the most trivial of things.
Who said anything about "good" programmers?
> The bugfilled world of IT is complicated enough as it is and always was like this.
That doesn't mean we can't make it more complicated.
Look, we got record numbers of people graduating with CS degrees, coming out of bootcamps, or just learning the trade straight off of Youtube.
We have to find extra work for these people, otherwise our salaries are going to tank because of increased competition.
> And yes, it is a spoof, obviously. That is obvious from its content alone, and it follows a long tradition of similar spoofs. However, enough people must have fallen for it, because Bjarne Stroustrup has felt the need to publish a rather irritated disclaimer in his FAQ!
As an aside, Flash is also extraordinarily inefficient and a plague security-wise, and always has been. Steve Jobs pointed this out a decade ago, of course.
Meanwhile, HTML continues to have none of those problems.
It was quite a pleasant and consistent experience compared to writing browser JS at the time(10+ years ago).
Adobe Animate can now export animations and scripts to HTML5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate
Their templates are quite flexible, and there's a lot of them, but it's not quite creating something original.
To this day iPhone still doesn't fully support HTML5: you cannot put a game canvas into fullscreen mode on iPhone (all other devices, including iPad, do support this).
And when PWA's became available, they were very slow in supporting Add To HomeScreen. And when they did, nobody knew about it.
So yeah, don't think apple did it to support standards. They did it to keep control within their own appstore.
I remember reading that and concluding it was the app store, so I'm pretty sure it already existed.
A quick search on wikipedia: "The App Store was opened on July 10, 2008, with an initial 500 applications available."
The article is dated 2010! If you can count that is 2 years!
Completely false...tsssss...
Flash was not present from the start, and the intention at release in 2007 was that web applications would be how 3rd party developers developed for the iPhone. The decision not to have Flash on the iPhone in 2007 cannot possibly have been to drive downloads from an App Store that did not exist.
If this was a coordinated attack on Flash in support of the App ecosystem, why wait so long to write that letter? Why launch your phone without an app store in the first place?
So no, they did not drop Flash because they like to support HTML5.
So if there is no Flash, an no full support of HTML5, it's pretty obvious the only way to get apps on iPhone is through the app store.
The iPhone had the ability to add a page to the home screen on day 1. Web apps were Jobs “Sweet solution” for apps on the original iPhone.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51160348/pwa-how-to-prog...
From iOS 1.0 designers figure out how to design a “Add go home screen” banner in html that would point to the right place.
Remember that the entire reason Adobe bought Macromedia/Flash in the first place (besides sheer market dominance) was to provide themselves a technical path forward from most of their products' classic Mac OS roots into the 64-bit/mobile era we're currently in. It's very obvious when you go back and see that the first version of Photoshop with a Flash-based UI and the first (Windows) 64-bit version of Photoshop were both CS4. Compare that to Photoshop CS3 where you don't have to dig very deeply into the Windows version's files before you start hitting the layers of what are obviously classic-Mac-style Resources.
Flash didn't make it on any other mobile platform. Serious attempts were being made way earlier than the iPhone, including for Symbian [0], making it available for high end feature phones. But all of them were horribly limited, and none could solve the rift between desktop Flash and low power devices flash.
Jobs saying that Flash won't make it on the iPhone was the equivalent of announcing that the iPhone wouldn't use Intel chips, it was just putting a stake on a dead body so everyone could stop trying to revive it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Mobile_devices
1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :)
2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)
Apple didn’t standardize anything on the web, nor followed standards.
What Apple wanted (and achieved) was to push their App Store to control everything and get that 30% of sales on top.
Even to this day Safari does not support standards that other browsers do. And, of course, they don’t allow other browsers to run on iOS.
That changed later, and clearly Apple enjoys the 30% now, but the grandparent comment is 100% accurate, and your first three sentences are 100% false.
The fourth statement is accurate, though!
"Apple introduced the App Store on July 10, 2008 with 500 apps" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/07/app-store-turns-10/
Apple's Flash restrictions were published in draft form in April 2010. http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-c...
And justified by Steve Jobs that same month: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
They were not. Apple was selling a browser in a phone which was a new concept for normal customers.
Blackberries were a thing back then and the iPhone killed them because of this.
Mobile Safari was certainly a lot better than browsers on the other phones though. And a lack of carrier garbage and interference on updates was also nice.
If apple had rolled out support for flash, the native app boom probably would have looked a lot different as company’s wouldn’t have felt as much pressure to modernize their whole customer facing digital strategy.
How was this not anticompetitive?
All of the major consoles since the NES (except for early revisions of the Genesis) have used technical means to restrict publication of games, and there has been no antitrust action on that. Nintendo was in a price fixing lawsuit and settled that with coupons for games with the Nintendo seal of quality.
If that's not subject to antitrust enforcement, why would the Apple app store criteria be?
Also, the US FTC threatened to investigate Apple over the "no third-party tools" thing they imposed on developers alongside "Thoughts on Flash". That's why they never followed through and removed it from their App Store guidelines.
So there is a limit - somewhere between "technical lockouts" and "we won't approve things made with third-party tools".
I did not like flash on Android, but I was happy to have it available when things were still transitioning away from it.
I was a Blackberry user at the time and the best hope for a standard website was that it had some watered down "mobile website" with the same important info because nearly every local business that had a website with hours/location/contact info had it done in flash.
Apple's decision was a major factor, along with HTML5 finally being supported by browsers with native functionality for animations and video support that had vastly superior performance. In the next 4 years, mobile took off like crazy beyond anyone's expectations and by the time the legendary iPhone 4 was released, Flash was at the beginning of the end.
It did work sometimes though, and it was great when it did. The Wii—while not portable—also supported an (outdated) version of Flash that I recall working quite well. There were even some Flash games explicitly designed to be used with the Wii Remote (although they couldn't really do anything special, they only had access to the IR pointer).
Which point do you mean? 2007 or 2010? Flash was more popular than it had ever been when the iPhone was released, and the iPhone had been without Flash for three years when Jobs wrote his letter.
Apple might not have aimed the gun, but they pulled the trigger.
The rest, as happened many times, followed Apple.
The reasons for banning flash were totally on point.
Not sure what came of that. I will probably need to google more
People don't realise how liberating and easy the multimedia of the flash years were. You could literally make a animated film and show it globally in an hour. Nothing comes close, still. Maybe we'll get a Web Assembly flash tool, when we all have 8Ghz PCs.