What would have happened if Steve Jobs hadn't made an ultimatum on Flash? The iPhone might have taken a few more iterations, but eventually they would have figured out how to support flash well in their phones. We might even be in a place where processors are designed to efficiently execute flash (the new M1 has so many specialization this is not even reaching out).
Instead what we have today is a mess of things that still don't add up to technology we had a decade back, and we have really bad, inefficient code running everywhere trying their best to emulate what flash did.
In the end, the reality is that Jobs made a tech forecasting mistake assuming HTML5 (not js) will eventually catch up with flash. It never did. As poor forecasting decisions go this is fairly reasonable, but we cannot move forward if we continue insisting that this was the best decision even in retrospect.
I doubt it. Adobe tried to make a go with Flash on Android to spite Jobs and it was a train-wreck. While Android makers were willing to put giant batteries in to support sloppy code, Apple wasn't.
> The iPhone might have taken a few more iterations, but eventually they would have figured out how to support flash well in their phones.
Apple shipped a phone with barely a day's battery life and it remained that way for years as features and performance caught up. If they'd shipped Flash, it would have cooked the CPU on every site it visited ruining the limited battery life the phone had. This is one of those cases where shipping less made a better product.
> In the end, the reality is that Jobs made a tech forecasting mistake assuming HTML5 (not js) will eventually catch up with flash.
You are splitting hairs. Nobody has made a perfect technology prediction 10 years out.
It never played well on any system I cared to use. The tools to generate it were unavailable to the likes of me and a lot of people here, who back in the day were second class citizens.
Also it tried to make the the Web TV before there was anywhere enough processing power at the ends nor bandwidth in the middle.
Designers on their expensive powerful machines built magnificent content that nobody who respected the technology in their personal stack, and paid a reasonable price for their infrastructure could use.
Well, back in the day we may have been second class citizens. How the world has changed. Good riddance to bad rubbish!
Adobe had zero F*s to give about anything not mainstream.
No one wanted to do it.
Flash run on PC's hundreds of times less powerful than your smartphone is right now. For the original iPhone, sure, but this resource argument is decades out of date now.
In the years after, all we've done is made HTML/JS/SWF as powerful as Flash and even more resource intensive.
The one ultimately responsible for Flash's death was Adobe, who neither felt it was worth investing in to overcome these issues, nor worth open sourcing to let the community give it a try.
What a loss.
For Adobe I give full marks for cajoñes and long term thinking, but I'm gonna have to deduct points for the closed nature of it all.
It is always difficult to try and second guess decisions which were made by other people behind closed doors. Particularly when you know the end outcome where the people who made the choices wouldn't have.
When Jobs wrote that memo, the iPhone wasn't remotely dominant. It had tiny market share on and Windows Mobile and Android were both very big threats to the iPhone. There could easily be an alternative history where Adobe wrote a really effective version of Flash and Apple was left out in the cold.
Fast forward 10 years and it all looks obvious, but I don't think it was a slam dunk back then.
But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed.
Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.