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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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