Hmmm, if only we had some cross platform framework that worked in every browser even before the iPhone was invented. /s

You mean the one that could barely run on 1Ghz phones with 1GB of RAM that the company behind it said they could have gotten it to run on a 128MB RAM first gen iPhone with a 400Mhz processor if Apple had allowed them?

I'd like to see how a web app of similar complexity would run on the same hardware. For all that people remember Flash being slow, remember the era of hardware it was running on.

By the time the iPhone was introduced, PC hardware was well into the GHz era with multiple GBs of RAM. The phone was much more constrained and didn’t have disk swapping.

And yet we didn’t have very complicated web apps (that didn’t use Flash). I’d like to see Slack on a 2008 PC.

Meanwhile, the Wii’s web browser supported Flash, and the Wii is a lot less powerful than an iPhone.

In that case why were the minimum requirements for Flash for Android when it did come out in 2010 and 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor and then it barely ran, ate up battery life, and was soon discontinued?

The first iPhone that came out with those spec’s was in 2011.

I think it’s a combination of:

- Android itself really sucked at this point in time.

- Android and iOS in 2010 couldn’t run complex web apps either without chugging. It really had to be native code to perform well.

So doesn’t that kind of tell you the answer to how Adobe was full of it when they complained that they could have ported Flash to the 1st gen iPhone if it weren’t for Apple blocking them? The fact that they couldn’t get it working well on phone hardware four years newer, over twice as fast, with 4 times as much memory with larger batteries?

Cross platform frameworks like the initial poster alluded to always suck compared to native purpose built frameworks.

We see that today with Electron - a battery killing, memory inefficient, platform.

I don't know.

Flash on the Wii, as I recall, worked well mostly for flash games that were designed with the Wii in mind, and for very simple interstitials. Anything more complex did not work well.

I think Adobe could have done something similar on the iPhone. I don't know that it would have been what people wanted, and I think it would have exposed some of the iPhone's hardware limitations to users.

Mostly though, I think Flash was a heck of a lot better than what we have today with overly-complicated webapps and Electron, as you referenced. That's the point I was trying to make—we've ended up with something even less efficient than Flash ever was!

If games were designed to target a specific platform, doesn’t that lose some of the benefit of a cross platform runtime?

Of course the iPhone hardware had limitations at the time. The iPhone OS was very optimized around its known limitations and it aggressively killed apps from running that drained battery life or used too much memory (and it still does).

Native iOS apps are very efficient. Now the thought of running apps in a Java virtual machine on a phone in 2008 like Android did wasn’t a great idea. The best thing that Apple did was help rid the world of Flash.

Are we saying those games on Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation and XBox are not part of 20 century culture?

No, we're saying that those games are not part of 21st century culture, which makes them culturally lost to time.