Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash”

Re:Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” by ZuLuuuuuu on Thursday May 06, 2021 @03:28AM (#27060144)

The essay rather suggests HTML5 as a better alternative to Flash for web development, not app development. Having said that, I haven't read the latest PWA situation on Apple platforms, maybe it is true that they are trying to prevent PWA from getting popular. If that is the case, I hope Google and Microsoft can take advantage of this shortcoming of Apple platforms.

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Re:Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” by midasuni on Thursday May 06, 2021 @03:51AM (#27060274)

When the iPhone launched there were no native apps, the idea was you could do everything as webpages

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Re:Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” by jpalomaki on Thursday May 06, 2021 @04:33AM (#27060525)

That was likely because they simply did not have time to implement proper support for 3rd party apps for the launch.

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Re:Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” by Benjamin_Dobell on Thursday May 06, 2021 @04:52AM (#27060648)

When iOS (then known as iPhone OS) first launched, Apple were actively/publicly against opening up their devices to third-party native app development. They encouraged third-parties to use web technologies as an alternative[1][2].

However, iPhone OS 1.0 launched without encryption enabled (not sure why, iPhone OS 1.1 enabled it), so this made reverse engineering efforts a lot more straight forward. For end-users, jailbreaking was trivial, you'd literally visit jailbreakme.com and a TIFF exploit in Mobile Safari would automatically jailbreak your phone (or in my case, iPod Touch) and install Installer.app[3].

A reverse engineered SDK was used to write apps and made quite the splash. This encouraged Apple to make available an official SDK. I'm not sure whether it was public pressure, or just that Apple saw the ingenuity of what people were achieving with Apple devices. However, iPhone OS 2.0 introduced the App Store, and the rest is history.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2011/oct/24/... [2] https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe

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Re:Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” by grishka on Thursday May 06, 2021 @06:20AM (#27061187)

I heard the explanation that iOS 1.0 ran everything as root and there was no sandboxing, and this was the only reason why there were no third-party apps.

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Re:Apple deletes Steve Jobs's “Thoughts on Flash” by irrational on Thursday May 06, 2021 @03:41AM (#27060216)

It is true, but how could they take advantage of it? Your average person doesn’t care. I recently learned that more than 50% of phones in the USA are iPhones. How can Google and MS move anything forward on the mobile front unless Apple is on board? It’s not like you can run a different web rendering engine or JavaScript engine on an iPhone.

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