The first part of this isn't quite correct if I am remembering correctly. Flash (or at least the engine behind it) is still on both Android and iPhone platforms through its app equivelant called Air. There's a lot of things that use Air... to give you an idea, Angry Birds was first written and deployed to Air. So though Apple complained about performance issues, they were not the biggest deal. If I was to take a guess, it was mainly to prevent the web from competing with the app store. So I think his comment is at least somewhat right. Apple didn't want an app store competitor (think Kongregate or Newgrounds competing with the games part of the app store)

Flash on Android existed, and I actually used it, and I can pretty much guarantee you it was never going to be competitive with the way it ran on contemporary smart phones. I don’t get how Flash applets on a website were ever at risk of competing with the app store. HTML and PWA is a more compelling option today than I think Flash ever was, and Apple contributed greatly to that fact with Webkit...

I tried it too and it wasn't the best. But I have a general feeling it was because those particular games weren't really well optimized for the phone. Then again, they were a it more complex than the other games on the phone at the time... but alas.

I'm not sure if it would have grown into a competitor either way. But some people definitely tried to - Kongregate at one point built an app specifically for mobile flash games. Naturally google took it down (you aren't allowed to host 'app stores' on the 'app store'). But it had quite a few downloads. That's just for something on the app store, not directly on a website, but I think the point is that maybe if things had gone a bit differently it might have been more competitive.

For PWAs, yeah, today, they definitely are, but it's taken a long time for them to come that way.

Hope your having a good day.

Of course, though, you can distribute your own app stores on Android via sideloading a la F-Droid and Epic Games. Perhaps in 2011, it just didn’t seem as doable, or maybe sideloading was disabled by more vendors... not sure.

Apple speech I guess.

It was perfectly fine on any Symbian and Android device I got to play with, and much better than J2ME ever was.

One time I accidentally left SpinControl.app on for a week and went about my business (SpinControl, RIP, was an app that logged stack traces any time an app didn't flush its event queue for more than a few seconds -- i.e. caused a beachball). A week later I came back and checked it to find something truly astounding: with hundreds of logged spins, 100% of them were due to flash. Usually in Safari, but sometimes in other embedded webkit contexts. You would expect a few spins to creep into that list from other causes, and indeed I triggered one with a mail index rebuild just to be make sure it was watching more than the browser process, but no, SpinControl was working fine. 100% of the beachballs in the last week were due to flash's suckiness, to say nothing of power usage or security.

Flash's performance issues, at least on the mac, were very real. Good riddance.

> much better than J2ME ever was.

If you lower the bar to the ground anyone can jump over it.

iPhone never had Flash I don’t believe. I was an Android user at the time and the only way Flash on my device could be described is in terms of locomotive incidents. Flash games and applications almost worked, although virtually none of them were responsively designed, and they mostly worked pretty poorly with touch controls, and unlike HTML there was no way to reasonably work around or improve this at the browser level, because it was just a big proprietary black box.

Worse than this was sites that used Flash in non-essential ways like ads. If you had Flash enabled on a blog or other site that just happened to pop up a flash ad, it would make the whole page janky, greatly hurting pan and zoom functionality and killing your battery life for no benefit.

Worst of all, Flash frequently crashed my browser and sometimes even caused the entire phone to reboot.

Phones now have better CPUs and GPUs and I am relieved beyond words that Flash is totally dead now. It was never ideal for what it was most popular for (videos, streams) which only became apparent after the alternatives stabilized. But even for games and other software, I just don’t think the NPAPI browser plugin model was worth keeping. Would the problems with touch usability and accessibility be resolved at some point? Maybe I don’t know - I presume Adobe Air was able to do it for native apps, although my experience with Adobe Air apps was also not very good.

J2ME may have been not the most thrilling platform, but I’d not be surprised if it had a better security track record at the end of the day. I disabled Flash before most people, and was using a userscript to use the then-new and buggy <video> tag for YouTube. I still, before that point, had been personally hit by a Flash 0day, and a couple of my friends got hit later by a malicious Mediafire Flash payload. There was a period of time where it felt like there was a new use-after-free in Flash every month. And when you look at all of the functionality stacked into this unsandboxed blackbox to keep it competitive and alive, I don’t feel it’s terribly surprising.

I don’t enjoy everything about the bloated platform that is the modern web, but the design of it is a lot more sound. It’s designed more as a platform than a product. You get a lot of totally brand new functionality, like WebRTC, that just wasn’t really going to happen with Flash.

Flash had to die. It wasn’t a part of the web platform, it was part of an Adobe product that was shoehorned into web browsers. If it has a good legacy, I reckon it will mostly be from nostalgia fueled denial.

Then you had a much much better experience than I did, across Symbian (UIQ3), Windows Mobile and Android.