Flash games weren't using standard HTML technology. They were basically running in a cross platform VM that worked horribly on mobile. Adobe claimed back in 2007 that they could get Flash working well on the original iPhone if Apple would have allowed it. The original iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. When Adobe finally brought Flash to Android it required a 1Ghz processor and I believe 512MB - 1GB RAM. That didn't become standard on the iPhone until the iPhone 5 in 2011.
Besides, what was the monetization strategy? People weren't going to give their credit card information out to dozens of websites.
I worked on Flash when the iPhone came out. Back then it still only had software rendering and the performance on early mobile CPUs was atrocious. They had Flash and Flash Lite but they both were terrible on the early Android phones that supported them.
I love Flash games but putting it on the iPhone would've just made the users mad at the 5 FPS performance.
How well did that work out? I mean, really? YouTube just completely switched from Flash, many other video sites are still pushing Flash or sometimes even Silverlight, HTML5 gaming has still yet to really take off the way Flash gaming did. All Apple did was push these interactions to native apps instead of on the web.
It's been what, 8 years since the iPhone was released, and Flash is still around. I didn't notice a huge decrease in Flash usage when Jobs made the announcement. It doesn't hurt that they have strong competition and Android can still to this day play Flash content if the user wants.
This is correct. Adope actually developed a flash player for the iPhone but Jobs said no. A year or so later, Apple allowed the Desktop-bound version of flash on the iPhone (it's called Adobe Air)... probably because they wanted users to get their games through the App Store.
Like I said: dwindling relevance. Nobody in their right mind uses Flash for anything important. The one small exception is games, but the iPhone platform has no shortage of games that are faster, better looking, and better tailored to the platform than anything you can do in Flash.
Flash is used for delivering ads (no thanks) and video (already covered by special-casing sites like YouTube). Flash is used for silly game sites, and we've got enough games on the iPhone (thank you very much (said by someone who has a non-game app (http://grafly.com) that's drowned out by all the game "noise" on the App Store ;-)).
Flash is the proprietary web, undiscoverable, unsearchable.
Flash is owned by entirely by Adobe, who make no bones about trying to build an entirely separate world in Flash to attempt to dominate the web and the desktop (AIR).
No thanks.
Edit: And, as antirez has pointed out, HTML5+JS+CSS are working hard to obviate Flash. With Google and Apple and Mozilla on their side, I think they have a good chance.
You are confusing. This discussion is about Flash and JavaScript on the web, and you're talking about iOS Apps. One has nothing to do with the other. So, you decided to take the context of the discussion (Flash on the web) and change it (Flash apps), and then limit it to specific hardware (iOS devices, as you cannot run iOS apps on Macs).
On top of all of that, you are confusing how Apple is trying to kill Flash and replace it on the iOS devices (which is not entirely accurate).
So, while you thought you were clear, you weren't. You were confusing, incoherent, and frankly, even after I tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, I still find your arguments weak.
> This seems really, really simple to understand,
Context. You cannot join a conversation talking about something completely unrelated and expect to be understood.
The point is that flash is a fading technology now... in a few years HTML5 will replace it for video purposes. The iPhone is a better gaming plattform. What if Apple released a similar technology to run Obj-C applications in the browser (think of the market for the already developed games to the iPhone)
Apple's policy of banning Flash doesn't really bother me, but 3.3.1 really, really, does. Having Flash on the iPhone as a means of cross-developing apps is the most interesting way for Flash to be on the device, for me: it would mean a lot of creative and fun casual games would be more easily available for me to play.
Video, I think, is a red herring; it's easier for web sites to switch to a different, HTML5-compatible embedding scheme than it is to rewrite Flash games in Objective C.
Flash is a huge problem. My biggest pet peeve is when people use Flash where it's not needed, like menus and logos that can be done using JS or HTML5. I downright refuse to use Flash in the sites I design. It's too much bloat for the user and it's unstable in some browsers.
And yes, iOS doesn't have Flash. But after trying Flash on an Android tablet and phone, I'm glad my iPad doesn't have Flash. The animations are slow, jerky, and don't even work properly in some cases. If I want to play a Flash animation, I'll use iSwifter or my laptop.
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