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Comment by michaelbrave | Hacker News Reader

The main reason flash was killed by Apple was also spite toward Adobe, they made valid excuses sure, but spite was the driving force

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Flash was absolutely NOT killed by Apple. Adobe killed Flash, and it was unrelated to Steve Job's letter.

Source: me. Was working at Adobe at the time, probably at the thing that actually led to the demise of Flash (not that it was my intention in any way to contribute to the death of Flash, the decision to kill it was a surprise to me as much as it was to anybody else).

(⊙_⊙) ... please elaborate!

I didn't leave _that_ long ago, and don't want to look up my contract/NDA to see when it expires, so I don't want to go into too much detail.

Flash cost Adobe a lot to develop (it was a big team). At some point, I speculate[+] that Adobe simply decided they no longer need the runtime, since the browsers have/will soon have all the capabilities that they need, natively. So why waste the money?

[+] I don't know for sure (e.g. I didn't participate directly in the decision); but still, I believe my speculation is much more informed that the typical net user who just noticed the coincidence and wanted to believe the narrative.

"Adobe simply decided they no longer need the runtime, since the browsers have/will soon have all the capabilities that they need, natively."

I think that ignores a very very significant reason for the browsers getting to that point of being able to supplant Flash being that is was terrible and security nightmare and Apple had shifted mindshare against it and shown it wasn't needed in a mainstream platform. It wasn't just Adobe graciously terminating a successful platform that gave them a lot of influence.

Never claimed that it was without problems. But look at the timeline: Steve Jobs letter was April 29, 2010. About a year later Adobe stopped development of Flash on mobile (that's when they really killed it, the next 10 years were necessary to implement the decision basically). You really think that letter shifted mindshare in 1 year? Trust me, the opposite was true, there were some really big players that wanted to announce flash support on mobile and were caught completely off guard.

Using flash cc several years before EOL, it just wasn't a particularly consistent environment to develop in regardless of target device, and if you wanted to make ipad apps you ran into lots of limitations on what you could actually do with a release build, not sure if flash ever got the opportunity to use runtime interpreted actionscript 3 on release builds for iOS... that would have been nice to have.

> The main reason flash was killed by Apple was also spite toward Adobe

Prior to and subsequent to Flash (a Macromedia product, fwiw) Apple & Adobe have had extensive relationships and interaction that are in no way indicative of spite.

The main reason Flash died is because performance & power consumption on mobile never got past garbage, despite the platform wars going borderline nuclear on the topic.

> they made valid excuses sure,

Perhaps it's my becoming an ol' fogey, but it's crazy to see the Apple haters of yesteryear also move toward historical revisionism.

While the best approach is to just ignore such FUD like "valid excuses, sure", it's also important the record not be owned by zealots and those who preach spite.

Jobs was mad at them for not coming in with more support when he went back to apple. also this.

https://bgr.com/tech/steve-jobs-iphone-adobe-flash-testing/

yes adobe and apple have histories tied together, but it wasn't always a rosie partnership.

Please let’s not forget what a morass Flash was in terms of security. Holy crap.

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