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Comment by AndrewStephens | Hacker News Reader

Please, flash would have sucked on phones. Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.

I wrote this [0] in 2010 and it remains my one tech prediction that actually came true.

A good example of where things lie today is StyScrapers[1] - a flash-like game completely implemented in HTML - not in a canvas but with div elements controlled by the physics engine. It runs smoother and uses the browser much better than flash ever could.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2010/2/mobile_safari_does_not_support_fl... [1] https://vole.wtf/styscraper/

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It didn't suck. BlackBerry had native API support for Air. You could easily port a Flash game using Air and integrate any native APIs you needed. We gave phones and tablets away to any developer who did this. It worked in the browser natively too without the need to install an extension.

But fuck Adobe because they didn't give BlackBerry the latest runtime.

Adobe killed Flash when they bought Macromedia.

> It didn't suck.

We're talking about a viewer for Flash web content, though, not freshly authored applications.

As point for reference: there was a Flash plugin for Android, for a short while (around 2011-2012). It was awful - not only did a lot of Flash content just not work at all (because it required mouse/keyboard style input), but any content that'd run at all would typically run very poorly on even high-end phones.

I guess I should have prefaced that if it was made with responsiveness in mind and you took from factor into consideration. Anything can suck. Responsiveness was a huge issue back then not just for Flash.

Oh no, it is awful that games designed for keyboard and mouse don’t run properly on a phone (which could be easily overcome with virtual overlay) so let’s get rid of 20 years of creative development and replace them with sludge of non portable idiotic mobile games. I can’t name a single “proper” game that came out of mobile phone era that

A) wasn’t a port of a Flash game B) had something that wasn’t possible with flash C) can be installed and available as easy as Flash

I remember this! I ported one of my games and indeed got a blackberry tablet. Then I ported another one and gave it to my friend to submit, now he also had one... It was huge for a poor student!

Everything sucks on mobile. Mobile UX is the most unimaginative garbage ever.

After a brief period of creativity, every mobile app regressed to 'search bar on top, list in middile, tabs on bottom' UX. Even this best case UX is mediocre at best.

The fundamental flaw is that touch is imprecise and your finger covers the screen, which is unsolvable without buttons.

The lack of buttons killed all creativity and possibility of having a good UX for games on smartphones.

Cross compilation to native code from flash runtime was absolutely possible, and absolutely never considered by Apple ;)

Fun fact nobody remembers: back in the day Adobe built a feature where you could build flash source to an iphone app - you hit "publish" and an .ipa came out. It worked fine, people made apps, they got accepted to the app store, users used them, etc.

Then a day or so before that feature left beta, apple added a vague new clause to their app store agreement, which made no sense on paper but whose obvious purpose was to disallow flash apps. They then unpublished all the existing flash apps for violating that clause. Adobe quietly cancelled the app publish feature, and a few months later apple quietly removed the clause.

What was the clause?

It was something like that the app must have been "originally written" in certain approved programming languages. It basically targeted cross-compilation, but it was written so vaguely that on paper it appeared to even disallow native iOS apps if they started out as a port from some other language.

There was briefly a kerfuffle about it, as people using other cross-compilation tools (xamarin? etc) worried their apps would get removed as well. But IIRC apple never actually enforced the clause, other than to remove existing flash-based apps and reject new ones.

But it did cause vendors of cross-compilers to lay of dozens of staff as the clause killed their business (Source: I work with someone who was laid off because of the clause)

I don’t recall Apple unpublishing my AIR apps. One of mine was among the first secretly submitted before Adobe revealed the feature publicly. However, I definitely remember after Apple added the new clause, when I needed to submit updates, those were stuck in approval limbo for many, many months. Then, suddenly, they all got approved in a flurry and there was never an issue again.

Adobe AIR is actually still available today (now maintained by Harman through an agreement with Adobe), and it can still compile native iOS apps that can be submitted to the App Store. This feature was never removed, and is still maintained to be compatible with new iPhones.

And if you tried any sites that used flash on an Android (early days when you could for a while) you'd understand why.

No keyboard: which broke most games.

No mouse: touch is not the same and hard to fake mouse controls with touch while supporting pan or zoom.

Small screen: flash was designed for bigger screens and everything was too small or needed zoom.

Flash wanted to control its event/animation loop: battery life was drained quickly even for basic content.

Mobile didn't kill Flash.

You see the same UI issues when controlling a Remote Desktop from a phone screen. Just difficult.

Not only it was possible, it has available during the last years from Flash.

Many Flash haters have no clue that before Unity and friends many of the first generation games on iOS were actually AOT compiled Flash games, despite Apple.

While it is hard to predict an alternative future, the Flash runtime had suffered numerous security issues after all and I agree that a fresh new runtime with any successor to Flash would have been technically much better. Flash really had an excellent authoring tool and a mediocre runtime.

Sounds like a good candidate for transpilation. Next big thing could be Flash.

It was perfectly fine on Symbian phones, and even after the whole iPhone drama, many games for iOS were initially done in Flash, as Adobe added AOT compilation capabilities.

However Adobe decided it wasn't worth it, given how plugins were going on browsers as well.

Naturally the Flash hating mob never got this.

> Even if the battery on the original iPhone could have stood the strain, none of the flash games that existed at the time would have been any fun at all on the phone's tiny screen.

This is still true today - there are very few fun games you can run on a phone. The primary problem is that phones only offer a single control, touching the screen.

I constantly have problems with the crossword puzzle app I have installed on my phone, because I can't reliably touch the right letters on the on-screen keyboard. Flash isn't the problem with putting games on a phone. Flash was a tool that people used to make fun games, but making fun games is pointless if you want people to try to play them on a phone.

A cheap stylus will solve this for your casual games. For real games you can try out a Backbone:

https://www.amazon.com/BACKBONE-Mobile-Gaming-Controller-And...

Modern phones are very capable of playing some pretty serious games. It’s fine to get a few accessories as I do agree fingers aren’t ideal.

> A cheap stylus will solve this for your casual games.

A stylus can solve the problem of not being able to target a point on the screen. It can't do anything about the problem that your game has to run off of a single control. Games need to be able to let the player do more than one thing.

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