Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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Steve Jobs blocked it from the Apple Store because Apple didn't invent Flash and he just did not like anything from outside Apple. For the same reason, you can't use the Firefox or Chrome browser engines on IOS. You just have to use Safari. Even if you are Mozilla and you are shipping Firefox to the Apple store. And I guarantee you this isn't because Mozilla thinks Safari is the better browser engine.

After that, security concerns lead to browsers eventually deprecating their plugin support. But it started with Flash getting a huge access denied on mobile, courtesy of Steve Jobs.

So, Flash became a lot less popular after that and Apple and Google successfully transitioned a lot of that stuff to their native mobile SDKs. That's why you have lots of games on IOS and Android and not a whole lot on the web these days. HTML 5 is hopelessly clumsy for that sort of thing.

A lot of the stuff people did with Flash is of course technically doable with HTML5 but mostly it seems designers shy away from doing those things because it's too hard.

Wasm is going to open up a lot of native and mobile SDKs for the web. And the web of course also works on mobile. There might even come an end to Apple blocking non-safari browsers in their app store.

> Steve Jobs blocked it from the Apple Store because Apple didn't invent Flash and he just did not like anything from outside Apple.

Or... he blocked it because of all the actual reasons listed when Flash was blocked? And the same reasons why it was blocked on Android just a year or so later?

Nah - both Apple and Google realized that Flash was a threat to their nice, walled gardens and ensured it died. You gottu have those chains secured tight.

It was widely established fact at the time that Flash was a bug-ridden resource-hungry hog. Which was fine for desktop, but not for the severely underpowered mobile devices of the day.

I mean, it's not ancient history. It only happened 10 years ago.

Nah, now you are re-writing history. Flash apps could be very lean and mean or they could be resource hogs - depending on the amount of bling one put in. They could be used to develop sophisticated, lean apps using a very productive toolchain. They were an extraordinary danger to the Apple apps paradigm. And they thus needed to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

And the fact was that Steve Jobs had a history and long habit of forcing walled gardens on consumers - something well known in that era.

In fact I would call it the "widely established" fact https://www.infoworld.com/article/2627117/iphone-developers-...

Of-course most of this depends on whether you had personal experience developing productive flash apps and whether one suffers from the Apple propaganda effect - where Apple's position is King and all other positions are null and void. I happen to see the latter quite often on HN.

Troupo is citing facts, you're citing incentives/habits. While incentives are powerful and those habits have been borne out repeatedly by Apple, one of you has the clearly more documented argument. To be convincing, you need to demonstrate that Apple chose to deprecate Flash to help establish a walled garden. You've shown that they'd probably _want_ to, but that's still one step away.

Aah..you are asking for documented, formal evidence. Unless someone leaks the trove of internals e-mails at Apple of the years before the previous decade, one isn't going to get this. Adobe was a competitor after all. Quite a high barrier for an argument that favours Apple.

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