Adobe claimed that it was Apple’s fault that Flash didn’t run on the original iPhone. But even if Apple has allowed it. Adobe still wouldn’t have been able to do it.

When Adobe finally did make it to Android, it required a gig of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The original iPhone had 256MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

One of the big selling points of the Motorola Xoom was that it would run Flash. Adobe was six months late leaving the Xoom in the embarrassing position that you couldn’t view its Flash enable home page from the device for at least the first six months.

Flash on mobile was always going to be shit because it was built without mobile in mind. It doesn’t support touch, it doesn’t make controls big enough to be usable by touch and it doesn’t implement the behavior people expect on a touch device.

Just running the plugin on a phone isn’t the hard part.

Not even referring to the interface. Adobe couldn’t get Flash performance, memory footprint or energy usage acceptable for mobile.

If the other problems would have been solved, the hardware has improved so much the performance issues wouldn’t have been much of an issue anymore. A modern phones performance can compete with a low end pc.

It was five years before an iPhone met the minimum requirements that Adobe gave for Flash on mobile. Even then, a VM based runtime per app would be more memory intensive and more battery intensive. iOS devices just this year have start coming with 3GB of RAM across the board. iOS was able to get away with less RAM precisely because all code ran natively.

Apple is able to optimize its OS, compiler chain, and processor in sync.

Not to mention that an even more stripped down version of the core OS with tighter constraints is running on the watch.

Not even mentioning that the average $250 Android device is much lower specced than the average iPhone. It wasn’t until last year that even high end Android phones were matching the performance of an iPhone 6s (released in 2015) in single core performance.

Remember when it was possible to have interactive animated vector graphics on the internet?

I know you're making a joke, but thought SVG has been there and working since before Apple outlawed Flash for its battery draining behaviour.

On paper you’re right. The most interactive svg content I’ve seen are small demos and even those have to be hunted for. You don’t have to (or at least you didn’t in the past) have to look very hard to find large amounts of quality flash content. Good tools were ripped out of artists’ hands and the internet is worse for it. Where’s the replacement?

It has been 10 years yet nobody has created a true replacement for Flash using SVG, Canvas, JS, etc. I wonder why?

I wonder if it's because, if one needs an expressive language, for vector graphics or whatever, then redundant things like XML and JSON are horribly non-concise choices, whereas Flash didn't suffer such problems, along with having excellent authoring tools.

Yeah have you tried authoring and animating SVG in 2008? Full of (browser support) holes and extremely poor performance, even on the "powerful" iPad in 2011. Flash by comparison would have been a breeze even on mobile.

Not really, by 2005 or so we all knew flash was terribly problematic and making the web much worse. Some people embraced it for sure, but in my experience most people involved with the web at this time had objections to Flash (and Adobe more widely).

Flash was fine for specific purposes .. animations and games mostly. Doing your whole site in Flash was dumb, but Homestar Runner and Newgrounds used it in really good ways.

Yet I’m not sure we would have reached that point now without the “dick move” then. Apple has always taken an aggressive stance to cut out things that reduce battery life. Blocking Flash and background processes were natural consequences

Good riddance, I remember when web browsing on Linux was obnoxious because every other site used Flash but the only plugin available was an older version for Firefox that had serious glitches like desyncing audio. It wasn't until like 2009 that Adobe started providing better binaries.

I wonder what NewGrounds is going to do about all their older content?

it was the right move. at that time flash was the biggest vector of attacks and the largest battery drain, why would you ever consider putting it in in the first place?

apple was just bold, big and loved enough to survive the backlash from flash fanboys who, outraged, went buying android phones and proceeded to never use flash there either.

I work in marketing and spent years trying to convince people to use less Flash ... but hey look at this snazzy thing a designer just cooked up. This got the to the point where they launched a site and were like "why isn't google indexing our home page?" and I'd have to say "well, I told you so."

Turned-out the creative people that matter listen to dicks like Steve Jobs where they don't listen to me. Note about 80% of where we were using flash were replaced by he trivial JS/CS or maybe a jquery plugin, it simply wasn't needed.

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.

Rubbish. Flash on Android was always an awful experience. The best you could say about it was that it existed.

Eh, I remember traveling in the early days of tablets and being delighted that it worked as an almost complete replacement for a laptop (or at least, the limited use of a laptop that one needs whole traveling), in a way that iPads didn't remotely approach. They couldn't even play embedded video!

I'm not a big fan of the tablet form factor in general, but it didn't make a lot of sense to hamstring it further by removing Flash.

> Flash on Android was always an awful experience.

Flash on anything but Windows was an awful experience.

It was basically his revenge to Adobe, which hesitated to migrate Photoshop to Intel processors, requiring user to run Photoshop in powerPC emulation mode (slow).

Flash required a 1Ghz CPU and 1GB of RAM when it came to Android. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Are we really sure it was Apple's fault? Their browser market share was always rather small and smaller outside the US. But Adobe seemed to reeeeeally abandon the thing after apple's decision. They could have at least open sourced it

We'd be in a very different world of Adobe and Macromedia never merged. Adobe really killed flash, but maybe it was inevitable. From what I read, Flash's test suite was subpar to non-existent and people were afraid to touch anything in the codebase.

It's so sad too because Flash is still amazing when it comes to animating vector graphics in a crossplatform way. Nothing in the HTML5 world remotely comes close.

You can upscale Homestar Runner to 4k and it renders beautifully. Now that it's all YouTube videos, whatever resolution they rendered it at, there it will stay for forever (plus you lose all the clickable eastereggs in the Strong Bad e-mails!)

> From what I read, Flash's test suite was subpar to non-existent and people were afraid to touch anything in the codebase.

If that's the case, Flash should be held up as a case study for the utility of robust tests. Because the amount of refactoring needed to make it fit the mobile world was significant, and if the codebase was fragile because of lack of tests, that refactoring may have proved expensive enough to kill the whole technology stack.