My understanding is that Apple were actually working with Adobe to develop Flash for the iPhone during the iPhone's development, but that Adobe were unable to meet Apple's quality (bugginess, crashing, etc) and power budget (A major restriction on the first iPhone - competitors didn't even think it was possible with current technology) targets. It was only at that point that Apple cut ties and went a different route.
From what I recall, Apple approached Adobe during development of iPhone to nail down performance/battery concerns of Flash and Adobe basically blew them off.
Initially, Apple actually looked at an iOS version of Flash. This was around 2009/2010 IIRC. There were special dev iPhones that ran Flash. Adobe didn’t want to optimize it because they thought the iPhone would fail. Apple thought the performance was garbage and the communication mostly ended. I got to play with one for a few days and the performance was terrible. Even simple games lagged and the touch points were a disaster.
Word on the street, at the time, was that Apple and Adobe collaborated actively on making Flash work on the iPhone without straining its battery. It is the failure to achieve that goal that prompted the whole about-face.
Bear in mind that Apple and Adobe have a very long and close history - Apple did not kill Flash to spite Adobe, they did it because 1. Flash was plagued with security problems, and 2. Flash was plagued with performance problems and the iPhone was a very low performance device.
Adobe never provided a usable non-dog-slow version of Flash for iPhone.
So Apple only had the choice between no Flash and a really bad version. Flash ran really slow on OSX compared to Windows, so it was unrealistic to expect Adobe to suddenly provide a good implementation of Flash for the iPhone. Adobe painted them into the corner by not properly supporting small platforms.
Supporting all of Apple's functionality was one of the reasons for not supporting Flash that Steve shared in his post, but I think you're right that Adobe not being able to get Flash working on iPhone was the main reason. Thanks for the correction!
Adobe claimed that Apple was stopping them from supporting Flash on the original iPhone. When Adobe did finally get Flash (barely) running on Android. It required 1GB of RAM and 1Ghz CPU. The original iPhone had a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM.
Adobe was late shipping Flash for the Motorola Xoom. Motorola touted being able to use Flash as a feature over the iPad. Leaving it in the unfortunate situation that you couldn’t even visit the Xoom marketing page running Flash from a Xoom for the first six months.
Adobe could never get Flash working on mobile well.
EDIT: It wasn’t until the iPhone 5 introduced 5 years later in 2012 that there was an iPhone that could have met Adobe’s specs for Flash.
Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to actually load Flash on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe could never produce something that wasn’t buggy crap.
There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either.
Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.
For years (even after iPhone shipped) Adobe only had "Flash Lite" to offer, and allowed it to lag many versions behind desktop version (e.g. Opera on Wii had trouble when YouTube started dropping support for Flash 7 and Adobe simply didn't have anything more modern available in "Devices SDK").
In Steve Jobs' defense, he begged Adobe to make Flash work on iPhone like four times and they couldn't make it work.
This isn't because Flash on phones would just never work[0]; but that Adobe was unresponsive to Apple's concerns. They viewed the iPhone as "just another thing to put Flash on" rather than something that absolutely needed special attention from the Player team. And it absolutely did need special attention.
As an extra insult to injury, Adobe's CEO refused to take Steve Jobs' phone calls[1].
[0] It absolutely could; it would have required implementing hardware-accelerated video, composited animation rendering, and the conditional-tap-to-click behavior that Safari used to handle rollover menus. Instead, Adobe handed Flash developers StageVideo, Stage3D, separate touch events, and told the developers to sort it out themselves.
[1] For context, every company involved with early iPhone software was on Steve Jobs' speed dial.
That was around when Adobe was planning to ship Flash with an automatic Flash-to-iOS App exporter. Apple tried to (and managed to) stop that from happening.
That’s kind of my point. Everyone claims that Apple alone stopped Flash from being on the iPhone. But, Adobe could barely get it running on a 2010 era Android phone that had a 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM.
How would they get it running on a 2007 era iPhone that had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB RAM?
Blaming Apple is provably not true. Adobe claimed that they could get Flash working on the first Apple iPhone in 2007. When Adobe finally bought Flash to Android, it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz CPU. Even then it ran badly and drained the battery.
The first iPhone had 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. The first iPhone that met those specs came out in 2011.
One of the biggest knocks against the iPad in 2010 was that you couldn’t view the “real Internet” without Flash. Adobe promised Flash on the Motorola Xoom that came out a year later. Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t view its Flash based home page on the device.
We know from the Epic lawsuit thats not true at all, they tried in earnest to get flash working on the iPhone[0] and Adobe just couldn't get the performance where Apple needed it to be, even with help from Apple
Apple and Adobe Systems have had a deeply troubled relationship. The most recent phase of their ongoing struggle has been over whether Flash (Adobe's hugely popular proprietary format for adding animation, video, and interactivity to web pages) would run on Apple mobile devices.
reply