Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.
Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.
The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%.
And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
> And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive.
One of his arguments, and not the most important one. Looking at https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F..., he says the most important reason is that Apple doesn’t want Adobe to be in control of a major API on iPhones (he buries that’s the main reason somewhat by mentioning it last because, I think, he knew that argument is more “because it’s good for Apple” than “because it’s good for our users”)
Yes, he mentions reliability, battery life, security, too, but those are things Adobe (in theory) could have fixed.
He also mentions Flash isn’t open. Again that is is something Adobe could have fixed, but I doubt they were fully willing to do that at the time
>Flash isn’t open
Angry proprietary sounds from a walled garden.
I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.
The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
First iPhone didn't have support for 3rd party apps. Steve Jobs even explicitly spoke about wanting to have all 3rd party things run in the browser.
Only when jailbreaking and custom apps got very successful, Apple introduced official app support and the appstore.
I think the Appstore was planned all along, just did not fit in the first release, so they adapted the launching narrative to: "the browser is enough for all 3rd party software".
No, Steve was very vocally against it until jailbreaks forced the issue. It’s well documented.
Vocally public yes… but they wanted to see what the diy scene created, how the power users were using the device and letting them develop the ideas and implement… they would open up and co-opt… boss tools is your drag down for all your settings case in point. This has been openly admitted to in interviews after the fact.
They 100% did not let the power users and DIY scene exist. It only existed by exploiting OS security vulnerabilities. Every new iOS release required finding a new way to crack it. That's why a lot of people chose Android.
For the first year, Scott Forstall, the Senior Vice President in charge of the iPhone's software, very directly encouraged companies like Pandora[0] to jailbreak iPhones in order to get a head start on app development, protected that community from Steve Jobs' ire, and then used the existence and popularity of jailbreaking to convince Steve that a sandboxed app store would be a better idea than Apple writing every single app for the iPhone[1].
Once native APIs were available, that was true, but before it was even clear that the iPhone would have an app store, they very much did let it flourish.
[0]: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/03/scott-forstall-pandora-...
[1]: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/04/06/apple-creating-all-the-ap...
[citation needed]
See this comment in the same thread for sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48541563
Sure, they’ll say whatever is needed to sell the products they have.
> I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash.
Why not? Flash was objectively an awful experience on mobile, and the iPhone was entirely about good UX.
> I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.
Initially the iPhone didn't even have an app store. They wanted everyone to make HTML5 apps.
I remember seeing stories about Adobe not being able to, or not wanting to, write a good energy efficient flash renderer for the iPhone, thus being another reason not to support it for Jobs (Adobe being of the mind that "Flash is so big, they'll have to support it" and Jobs proving otherwise)
Forget efficient.. they couldn't manage to create a Flash that didn't crash your browser or have gaping security holes discovered left and right.
They also either could not or would not write efficient Flash clients on Mac OS or Linux, while the Windows version was fine.
I bounced around a lot between the three OSes at that time, and Flash was bad enough on the other two that I would almost automatically reach for Windows when I had to use it.
It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
and now they make probably insane marketshare on the AppStore alone.
> Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/app-store-ecosystem-r...
Then again, they chose to use those exact words in their webpage, so you decide how large a grain of salt to take.
Apple didn't even have an AppStore in mind until people started hacking apps onto it.
Remember back in 2007 when Apple first told developers that to develop for the iPhone, they’d need to build WebApps for Safari? Well, that really was the plan. At the time, Jobs said:
The App Store came later and apparently as a reaction to jailbreakers and developer backlash.https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
Jobs hated Adobe:
According to the biography, Jobs’ longstanding animus toward Adobe helped form his vision for Apple’s tightly controlled mobile environment.
In 1999, he was flatly denied when he asked Adobe to create a version of its popular Adobe Premiere digital-graphics software for the Mac. Adobe also wouldn’t rewrite Photoshop for the Mac’s operating system, even though Macs were popular with designers.
“My primary insight when we were screwed by Adobe in 1999 was that we shouldn’t get into any business where we didn’t control both the hardware and the software, otherwise we’d get our head handed to us,” Jobs said, according to Isaacson.
The two companies go back together even further. Apple invested in Adobe in 1985 and they worked together early on. But Jobs, who in Isaacson’s book comes off sometimes as vindictive and brusque as he was innovative and inspirational, told Isaacson that Adobe went downhill after founder John Warnock retired.
“The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left,” he said. “He was the inventor, the person I related to. It’s been a bunch of suits since then, and the company has turned to crap.
https://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/09/tech/mobile/flash-steve-j...
> The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left
Very OT, but can I say i’ve seen this happen at every company i’ve been? When the founder(s) get out of the picture they kinda bring the soul of the company with them.
Yeah there’s a fading halo still in the air for a while, but it’s just that: a fading halo.
> I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform
Jobs didn't see a revenue stream, he cared about being in control of how well his own products worked.
He was never going to allow a third-party SDK to define the user experience, least of all one as bad as Flash.
I’m sure it was a combination of factors. One thing to remember back then was that Apple’s position was far more tenuous than now - Microsoft owned the desktop and server market, and the established phone companies were deeply entrenched with things like long-term contracts. Apple knew they had to execute very well _and_ that was coming off of experiences like Motorola’s chip business self-disintegrating and Microsoft playing cutthroat with Office and Internet Explorer, all of which left Apple’s senior management highly determined not to lose control of their platform. I don’t think anyone realistically expected the kind of growth we saw on the App Store as much as making sure they didn’t get squeezed by a more powerful competitor.
(To give you an idea of how bad it used to be, Qualcomm’s BREW platform launched with terms for developers like $50k per carrier per app to be listed AND a percentage of your gross revenue – not just the app, everything!)
The performance problems were very real, too, at a time when they were sweating every bit of RAM and CPU but the bigger problem was usability. Android kicked Flash to the curb, too, because while it was technically possible to make it run on a phone with a touchscreen was horrible — even the Android superfans barely talked about it as an advance because nobody liked Flash even if they had their phone plugged into a charger.
I would buy this argument if Flash as a browser plugin had been proven to perform well on a mobile device of the time, but it never was, on Android or any other platform.
Even AIR apps - think Electron, an application shell for Flash apps - were on the edge of usable on desktop Macs of the era.
I think it was both. If you ever used Flash on an Android phone at the time, it was a very quick way to empty your battery and make your phone a nice heater.
When the iPhone came out, Flash was solely responsible for MOST of desktop app crashes... It was a pretty easy win not to even support it.
Maybe. But also Flash, on the mobile devices of that time that did support it, was a miserable experience. Slow and broken and drained the battery.
There was also the argument that "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash"
I'd love a browser switch to disable JS in N layers of IFrame... maybe you can have it one layer deep, but nested, it just disables. That would save a lot of grief.
Flash had many issues for sure, first and foremost security. But I can’t help but feel sad of what was lost since then. The Flash era produced some really unique experiences on the web.
It was always fun when you were trying to find a contractor or something and got greeted with https://web.archive.org/web/20101028145116/http://industrial... .
Lol, damn, I do not miss those days. I'm also reminded of those awful LowerMyBills.com flash ads. Sadly, they're still around, just using whatever tech is at hand to make the worst ads possible, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/98a1yp/l...
it was about as unique as seeing corn in my poop sometimes.
Lot of it was bad, sure, but there was so much games and animation done by literal kids back then, because of how easy it was to create something with the tooling. Nothing even come close today, unfortunately.
The JimCarrey.com website was cool. That's about the only flash thing I came across that was though. Now gone as a site but recorded on video https://youtu.be/B1XZixLBurQ I'm not sure you can do those things in javascript to this day?
Sounds like you didn't experience all the awesome flash games and animated videos etc that people made.
I suppose there's no accounting for taste, but from happy tree friends to xiaoxiao3's flash fights, indie animators made some pretty awesome stuff back then. My university experience included a lot of checking for new, cool flash animations back around 2002. Homestar Runner was another pretty big one.
edit: Space Ghost Coast to Coast was Flash. Harvey Birdman must've been, too.
Flash as an animation tool vs Flash as a web development tool are two very different discussions. There's overlap and they're related but still separate.
Flash was very interesting as an animation tool because it was at its core a vector drawing animation tool. All the scripting components were icing on the cake allowing automation of things that's incredibly tedious in traditional animation.
The fast vector animations made Flash very useful for web distribution. That's all well and good. But as it became the go-to for interactive websites the structure of Flash was antithetical to the web. Deep links became meaningless and content became locked behind Flash. Adobe was also a terrible steward of Flash and only put effort into Flash for Windows. Every other platform was an also-ran for them and the Flash experience was terrible.
The security of Flash was a bad joke on top of it all.
As an animation tool and delivery vector for interactive content beyond the abilities of browsers of the era it was useful. As the front end of the web it was an awful mess.
And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling.
Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.
Those are all open web standards, though. Flash was a proprietary platform. I can't even run Flash stuff anymore because it was proprietary.
Ruffle is quite good now. I haven't found many applets that don't work with it.