Flash died because Jobs wanted it to die. He was worried about AS3s extremely fast development rate (the vector art in fla was years ahead). If iphones supported flash they could develop their own stores and push out games -- all going around apples gating. Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed.
I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple.
Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.
It was also hard to get a non-app store version of pure HTML/JavaScript on the iPad. With severe restrictions to localstorage.
"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.
I'm going to disagree that Jobs killed Flash. It's more like Adobe neglected and abused the Flash platform, and as part of that, they failed to actually get it working on mobile.
Remember, Apple actually begged Adobe to get build a version of Flash Player that wouldn't burn iPhone users' batteries. They did the same thing when the iPad came out. They knew not having Flash was a weakness. Adobe utterly failed to "get" mobile and shipped plugin builds that were about as buggy as the desktop version was.
Getting Flash to work on iPhone would have taken a huge commitment of resources on Adobe's part, similar to how Apple spent lots of time and money getting Safari/WebKit to render mobile sites correctly. It's not impossible, it's just something that you need executive-level buy in on. Google thought Jobs was bluffing and decided to allow Flash on Android; and it was so terrible that Adobe dropped it a year later.
As an example of what Adobe's real priorities were; two years after "Thoughts on Flash" Adobe decided to gate off certain Flash APIs behind a revenue sharing agreement so they could charge Unity developers to cross-compile to SWF. No, really, that happened. Adobe conjured up a whole licensing scheme and everything for it, because they wanted to make sure someone was there to pay for AS4 development. The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform.
I genuinely feel Apple may be unlearning this lesson.
Apple wanted to kill flash because it was CPU intensive and Jobs hated it. They wanted the first iPhone(s) to have great battery life and the web was plagued by flash intros, games, and what not at that time.
It didn’t help it had a lot of security issues and it certainly helped its downfall. IMHO we are better without it and good riddance.
I strongly disagree that the only reason Flash died was Steve Jobs/Apple's personal vendetta against it. Sure, it might've played a part, but as other commenters already pointed out Flash was riddled with problems - it was a resource hog, the macOS implementation was buggy and slow and Adobe seemed to not care about fixing these problems, and it had a very bad record of security holes. Plus it was closed source and the format itself was undocumented.
I can see how all the aforementioned problems made it so Apple didn't want to include it on its mobile devices. And even if politics played some part in it, these problems made it easy for Apple to convince everyone else that retiring Flash is the right thing to do.
Apps were just an excuse for Jobs to own the iPhone platform. It's why they killed Flash - they didn't want a cross-platform way to develop apps and marginalize their plans.
This is nonsense as initially Apple was pushing web apps, it actually took a lot of convincing to get them to move to native code. Flash never provided a good user experience.
Apple’s App Store is filled with ugly apps that have poor performance. People will write that kind of software on anything that has enough programmability.
So it’s not that Jobs killed Flash to save users from bad taste. It was because Flash was the most widely deployed cross-platform runtime of the desktop web era (at one time on 96% of computers!) and he didn’t want Adobe or anyone else to have that kind of power anymore.
They were basically four uses of Flash on the Internet. Some people used it to make entire websites, which generally ended up looking nicer but been much harder to use (I am STILL looking at you HBO). I was didn't work on the iPhone at all.
Next up you had games, which also didn't work on the iPhone. Games basically all assumed a mouse and keyboard so the chances of them actually working well if you try to play them on an iPhone would've been terrible anyway.
A highly despised use with advertising. Thanks to the incredible power of flash not only could pop ups be made, but you could have dancing around little distracting graphics with lots of sound and even video sucking up all your bandwidth.
Last you had online video, which was fixed by the built-in YouTube app and Apple's pushing for HTML5 and HTML live streaming.
But the most important thing you have to remember is that flash absolutely sucked down resources. On a (at the time) recent laptop you could easily tell when a website loaded flash. Not only did things respond better with flash off but battery life could be significantly affected. You could get extra hours on your computer. And if you think flash on windows was bad, you should've tried living in the Macintosh ecosystem. Adobe clearly didn't care so flash performance was drastically worse.
If it was bad on a laptop, you know how much worse it would've been on the original iPhone. The original (and even the 3G) were very constrained devices. Even if flash could've been put on them, I doubt it would've been performant at all for real content.
I think Apple was completely correct. I had already started using a flash blocker by that point just so my laptop wouldn't get too hot and drain the battery too fast. There were better ways to do video, answer now less of noxious since they can't play sound, and games run better than ever
since they are apps.
Incredible popularity of the iPhone and the iPad was the thing that finally put flash out of its misery you. It should've died long before that for being so on optimized but no one else had enough power to do it. Apples move did more than anything else to get us into the modern HTML5 Web 2.0 world. I imagine there'd still be tons of flash only sites if it wasn't for the iPhone.
I don't think Steve Jobs necessarily is responsible for this, but that he was aware that it was going to happen. If the iPhone had shipped with a poor implementation of Flash, which was all Adobe was capable of delivering, Flash would still eventually die off. Jobs was just aware that it was worth the sacrifice of political capital to do away with Flash, since in a few years it would be a moot feature.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
I just do not believe it. It was the best available rich presentation/interaction game in town. Trivial to get started and no need for a platform to sign off on your work.
No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.
At the time, iphone was initially intended as platform for HTML5 apps, which it can still do today. So less about App Store, more about a number of dimensions of usability. Devs demanded native apps, not Jobs.
The problem with Flash was that it was a grossly inefficient runtime for arbitrary code with security issues, an extreme battery hog, and had no affordances for touch (e.g. you couldn't 'hover'). As I recall, battery was the biggest problem, security close second, UX inconsistency third, and runtime for arbitrary code (still disallowed!) as nail in coffin.
I always thought Flash died because Apple didn't want people to be able to write and execute arbitrary code in an app on their phones. That it posed a security risk, a stability risk, and potentially a business risk (as it could allow people to circumvent the limitations they'd imposed on, say, distribution and payments). Is that wrong?
Flash died due to its own sins. Apple never had a dominant marketshare to do that, Apple simply did not let that crap on its mobile platform which had %0 marketshare when that happened. Then the open web standards that can do most of the stuff that Flash was used for took over.
Google tried to support Flash, even it was listed as Android's "strength" over iOS but the tech that came to handle the most use cases of Flash was much superior and it killed Flash on desktop too.
Nonsense. Adobe may have been the one to pull the plug, but the Flash era would have been stretched by at least a couple of years if Steve Jobs hadn't pitted the weight of the entire iPhone community against it.
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