Apple banned flash when web apps were the _only_ apps on the iphone (besides the preloaded apps). The App Store [1] is ~18 months after the iPhone [2] was released.
Apple today is very different from the Apple that launched the iPhone and the original App Store - they started off thinking all apps could be PWAs, but the Web Platform wasn't mature enough at the time and they pivoted to native, that's the actual truth.
Now they're addicted to in-app-purchase money from casino games and don't want that money moving out of their 30% taxable grasp. It's a sad story, truly.
This interaction was with Tony Fadell who had been involved with an Apple smartphone since 2004. The iPhone App Store would launch in 2008. 'Thoughts on Flash' would be penned in 2010.
There's maybe not a straight line march from iPhone to App Store, but the right people had had years to think about how an App Store business would work. And even built a first draft implementation for the iPod. When they ultimately decided on that direction, they weren't starting from zero.
And Tony Fadell famously lost the job of making the iPhone. His idea was to use the OS used in the iPods. Jobs instead chose to minify macOS. Fadell then kind of lost his political grip at Apple and left afterwards.
If that’s the case, why aren’t all of the same games moving to the web for Android?
SciPlay in particular comes to mind because they have built out their own payment processing on platforms that support it. They explicitly want to avoid headwinds from Walled Gardens making decrees. They would already have momentum if/when mobile platforms allow third-party transactions.
That's not to say they would also abandon the distribution benefits the mobile storefronts offer over PWAs. But payment processing wouldn't be the sole thing that keeps them. This is why Apple fights so vigorously to defend their wall. The benefit isn't innate for players or for developers. Once developers reach a certain level of maturity, the wall benefits Apple at everyone else's expense.
With the recent cracks in the wall caused by Epic, I would expect social casino space to be an early adopter in any alternative payment flows that emerge. But honestly I would expect games in general to react quickly, since Apple is walking in Facebook's footsteps and actively detoxing their games revenue habit in favor of advertising revenue. There's more incentive than ever to build a direct relationship with your customers instead of having to proxy them through Apple.
They did the next best thing, which is to sideload the app that UE can build.
PWA keeps the ecosystem honest. It doesn't have to be the premier platform of choice, but it needs to be a choice available.
Historically using the first-party app stores for distribution & payment processing has been more profitable than doing those things on your own. The second it isn't, people won't use app stores anymore. There's nothing intrinsically good or bad about any of these technologies. They're all a means to an end - profit.
We are headed into the next era of mobile apps. Developers who initially found the app store taxes appropriate during the smartphone boom, are now looking to renegotiate the terms as the market stabilizes. There isn't enough growth to go around anymore and make everyone's shareholders happy, so everyone in the supply chain between developer and user will go to war over what's there and what's fair.
This will slowly pick apart all the unjust contracts preventing developers from pursuing alternatives. And as these contracts fall, other distribution technologies will gain momentum. It may be other app stores installing apks and ipas onto phones, it may be PWAs. It doesn't really matter.
There are plenty of ways to fund App Store purchases that don’t involve credit cards and parents aren’t going to give their kids their credit card numbers.
The other big revenue source from mobile - doesn’t involve money going through the app stores at all. They are services surfaced through apps where users already don’t pay through the App Store - like Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft office and all of the B2B apps.
Neither Apple nor Google care about the little Indy app developer.
You keep talking about “unjust “ fees. I’m talking about developers of casino style games that make almost all of the money in the App Store - this came out in the Epic trial.
It’s not about the little guy - no one cares about the little guy - including Apple.
I haven't talked about unjust fees I've talked about unjust contracts, which prevent forming a direct relationship with customers, aka export your business off the app stores. Once you build the business there they don't want you taking it anywhere else. And they'll wield their influence over smartphone hardware to keep developers complacent. There was just a big antitrust case about this, and the walled garden lost. The losses will continue. The big developers with big resources will use these new pathways to extract more revenue at Apple's expense. Nobody is talking about little guys except you.
They didn’t make a PWA.
And I don’t want a “direct relationship” with app makers for them to spam me. I use “Hide my email” for a reason.
And the “wall garden” didn’t lose the case.
Apple won on almost every account. The reason Google lost is that they changed the rules of the game after a consumer bought into their “open platform”
...now, putting on my conspiracy hat... how difficult is it for n00b-company/developer to get a business license to accept credit card payments (and issue refunds/chargebacks) for SlotMaster9000, versus "I'm and app-store developer, Apple fronts the income-washing and chargeback hassles as a first-line defense.
Literally: what's the difference in setting up a Shopify thingy full of digital-content-tokens and running Apple Pay on it?
Remember that WebGL video-poker thing a few months ago? Wire that up to Apple Pay and what's the difference?
Besides, many people don’t want to pay every random website and they trust Apple.
I'm not denying that they're predatory with the App Store. I'm saying that not supporting Flash can be explained quite easily without ulterior motives.
I don’t love how other things were locked down, but losing Flash for the open web was an unabashed win.
I think the biggest issue here is that even a decade out there haven't been true flash replacements in some sectors of tech. e.g. we still call it "Flash animation", but I feel the early death of Flash stalled American animation for a good 5 years since there was simply no good artist tool for such stuff in the early 2010's
For which I'm eternally grateful to them even though I don't have any Apple devices.
Offer an (optional) walled-garden experience, ok, but locking down users from installing their own software is predatory.
The fact that Adobe could not have made a Flash player app (imagine an app which you point an URL at to load its Flash content) helps explains the problem.
Adobe claimed that they could have gotten flash running on the first iPhone in 2007. The first iPhone had 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor.
Safari barely ran on the first iPhone. It had to draw a checker box on the screen when you scrolled fast and then slowly render the image.
When flash finally did come to Android. It required a 1Ghz CPU and 1 GB of RAM in 2011. It still ran slow and ate up users batteries. That’s about the time the first iPhone came out with those specs
they've already shown a shadow of their true colors when they banned flash under the guise of security (which is also a problem, but for which apple conveniently uses as an excuse).
This is their true intention. The app store and the easy revenue from those sales are just not something they'll willingly give up.