And since Apple devices have such a large market share, many web sites realized they needed to switch to HTML5 to support this market share.
I also think Apple's public rejection of Flash affected its reputation, and Flash was seen as an outcast by some. It became "cool" to switch to HTML5.
It was a snowball effect that resulted in their ultimate demise.
That's how I observed it anyway over the past few years.
"Flash on my Galaxy Nexus drains the battery."
If you read http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/, you'll see that point #4, was all about battery, and battery life is indeed, an element of a "performant" device.
Although I do agree with your comment, I think that Apple's reasons for ditching Flash went beyond their public words.
I very much doubt that this is true. Most modern smartphones have a dedicated video decoding chip. Flash, on the other hand, is entirely in software. This means that to play a video the system in question has to load up not just video codecs but a full-stack VM -- Flash -- as well, and the CPU is responsible for most of that responsibility. At that point the power efficiencies gained by offloading functionality to a dedicated chip are lost.
Now, Adobe might have pursued a route wherein those functions were offloaded to the AVC chip and/or the GPU, but they were not apparently successful in being able to do so.
> Although I do agree with your comment, I think that Apple's reasons for ditching Flash went beyond their public words.
Why? I think at this point history has shown that those publicly stated reasons were entirely valid. Efforts to make Flash run efficiently on tablets and smartphones failed, despite energetic attempts to do so.
Evidence tends to support the view that Flash failed on mobile on its own shortcomings.
I think everything Apple said about their reason for not allowing Flash was true. I think they really did believe it made a sucky experience that people would blame on the phones, instead of flash.
I also think that wasn't all of their reasoning on the subject. The business value of not allowing cross-platform tools was huge. It effectively created a lock-in early-on in the iPhone's tenure. Of course, I have no evidence of this, but Apple has been too shrewd not to consider it.
So, in our world, where flash sucked, it wouldn't get on the iPhone regardless of the lockin implications. But in a world where flash didn't suck, I think the same decision would have been made.
The interesting thought question is whether consumers and developers would have allowed it in that world, and, if they didn't, how would the reduced lock-in have affected iOS share.
Ahh, I see. Perhaps. That is certainly a defensible position. But to continue on the speculation: I'm not so sure. If Flash hadn't sucked then there would have been demand for it that Apple would have been forced to listen to. Their position in mobile was not strong early on.
As a happy Apple customer, I'm not sure if that would have been a better or worse world. I'm very happy to have Android out there, keeping competitive pressure strong, but having Apple run basically unchecked early on caused a massive revolution that altered the whole mobile world, and in a cross-platform app world, would that have happened?
Regardless of whether it is true or not, both drain the battery. Flash probably does drain it faster, but I'm only talking from a user perspective. I will watch about five minutes of video online a day, on average. The difference isn't noticeable for my use case, and probably not for most other peoples.
> Why? I think at this point history has shown that those publicly stated reasons were entirely valid.
No one said they weren't. What I'm saying is that it is likely that there are other reasons for Apple not wanting Flash on their system.
> Efforts to make Flash run efficiently on tablets and smartphones failed, despite energetic attempts to do so.
What efforts?
> Evidence tends to support the view that Flash failed on mobile on its own shortcomings.
Again, no one has said anything different. I'm saying that Flash works well on the Galaxy Nexus, and as a result will probably work fine on the iPhone if Apple wanted Flash on its system.
So I suspect "it drains the battery" is covering for a deeper issue, like perhaps: were we getting good value from Flash?
They only made money off of development tools and services, not plugin installs, and they can do that off of HTML5 as well. (They would have competition there, which is a disadvantage, of course.)
They did try to monetize higher-end games, with the 9% revenue model they introduced. But apparently they found with their partners that it had no future, so they cancelled it.
I am in the process of porting our suite of educational products from AS3 to Haxe/NME/Jeash purely to hit tablets, but it looks like we might have to use it on the desktop too if this exodus keeps up.
Note that Flex and the AS3 compilers are now an Apache open-source project, it's just the player that isn't.
They never invented one successfull webdeveloper product, and those they bought from Macromedia ( Dreamweaver , Fireworks , ColdFusion , Flash)...havent evolved a bit or are dead.
They fired most of the legacy Macromedia work force anyway. They should sell all these tools or open-source them.
That said, I personally would still avoid Edge just because of Adobe's past record. It might seem petty, but I've lost faith in the company so there's little incentive to pay to join their HTML5 services.
So what happened is that, to reach this new segment of the market, web developers needed to develop two versions of their applications -- one for iOS and one for everybody else. This in turn spurred development of non-native web technologies, for those applications where a fully native version wasn't feasible, which further reduced the demand for Flash. Adobe was forced to try and play catch up, and that's a really tough position to be in.
Good riddance, but I'm fully expecting Flash's niche as a provider of abusive advertisement and wretched restaurant menus to be filled soon enough. To paraphrase Jurassic Park, "shitty software will find a way."
Heck, if someone made an OSS clone of Fireworks I'd be happy. Why is everyone in the open-source community with graphics knowledge trying to clone either Photoshop or Illustrator? (And no, I don't mean "a pixel-art editor" in the style of Pixen; Fireworks indeed does that, but also contains the live vector texturing and manipulation logic from Flash.)