Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Apple’s App Store is filled with ugly apps that have poor performance. People will write that kind of software on anything that has enough programmability.

So it’s not that Jobs killed Flash to save users from bad taste. It was because Flash was the most widely deployed cross-platform runtime of the desktop web era (at one time on 96% of computers!) and he didn’t want Adobe or anyone else to have that kind of power anymore.



At that point it wasn't as much about control[0] but as that the runtime really was bad. I used it when they released Flash on Android and it was completely unusable. Extremely laggy, the mouse events did not map to touch events well at all, and it would out of memory crash all the time.

Replacing flash on the web with HTML5 was actually a good thing. It's just unfortunate that nobody has built any good web authoring tools for "mere mortals" to use.

[0]Remember the iPhone was launched with no App Store, and Steve Jobs just thought that everyone should write PWAs in HTML5. It took developers jailbreaking the phone, making native apps, and massive internal pressure from Apple people to make him go ahead with the store. But it was partially about control because at the time Flash was a huge source of security bugs and drive-by virus infections from just loading a flash ad. Apple would have to release emergency OS updates if they had bundled flash and they never wanted to be tied to someone else's schedule.


True, Jobs did not want Adobe to have that kind of power, but I am also glad he killed it, Flash apps were fugly, heavy, and the runtime created security problems.


But the main reason, I think, was the flash runtime was an energy hog, and at the time (up until iPhone 4 or so), that meant using a Flash website on an iPhone would shorten battery life and put the blame on Apple.

At the time, they vetoed many things for that reason.


Yes, it was a problem.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: