For Flash vs iPhone case, it was indeed mostly politics. People were using Flash and other plugins in websites because there were no other alternative, say to add a video player or an animation. iPhone was
released in 2007 and app store in 2008. iPhone and iPad did not support then popular Flash in their browsers. Web experience was limited and broken. HTML5 was first announced in 2008 but would be under development for many years. Not standardized yet and browser support was limited. Web apps were not a thing without Flash. Only alternative for the users was the App Store, the ultimate walled garden. There were native apps for everything, even for the simplest things. Flash ecosystem was the biggest competitor and threat for the App Store at that moment. Finally in 2010 Steve Jobs addressed the Flash issue and openly declared they will never support it. iPhone users stopped complaining and in 2011 Adobe stopped the development of mobile plugins.
Adobe was in a unique position to dominate the apps era, but they failed spectacularly. They could have implemented payment/monetization options for their ecosystem, to build their own walled garden. Plugins were slow but this was mostly due to hardware at the time. This changed rapidly in the following years, but without control of the hardware, they had already lost the market.
> For Flash vs iPhone case, it was indeed mostly politics.
It was politics in the sense that Flash was one of the worst cause of instability in Safari on OS X, and was terrible at managing performance and a big draw on battery life, all of which were deal breakers on the iPhone. This is fairly well documented.
> iPhone was released in 2007 and app store in 2008. iPhone and iPad did not support then popular Flash in their browsers.
There were very good reasons for that.
> Web apps were not a thing without Flash.
That is entirely, demonstrably false. There were plenty of web apps, and they were actually the recommended (and indeed the only one) way of getting apps onto iPhones before they scrambled to release the App Store.
> Flash ecosystem was the biggest competitor and threat for the App Store at that moment.
How could it be a competitor if it was not supported?
> iPhone users stopped complaining
It was not iPhones users who were complaining. It was Android users explaining us how prehistoric iPhones were for not supporting Flash. We were perfectly happy with our apps.
> and in 2011 Adobe stopped the development of mobile plugins.
Yeah. Without ever leaving beta status. Because it was unstable, had terrible performances, and drained batteries. Just what Jobs claimed as reasons not to support it.
> Adobe was in a unique position to dominate the apps era, but they failed spectacularly.
That much is true.
> Plugins were slow but this was mostly due to hardware at the time.
Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?
> Then, how could native apps have much better performance on the same hardware, on both Android and iOS?
Web engines were honestly not great back then. WebKit was ok but JavaScriptCore was very slow, and of course that’s what iOS, Android, and BB10 were all running on that slow hardware. I have distinct (bad) memories that even “GPU-accelerated” CSS animations were barely 15fps, while native apps reliably got 60fps unless they really messed up. That’s on top of the infamous 300ms issue, where every tap took 300ms to fire off because it was waiting to see if you were trying to double-tap.
So I really think some of the blame is still shared with Apple, although it’s hard to say if that’s because of any malicious intent to prop up the App Store, or just because they were under pressure to build out the iOS platform that there wasn’t enough time to optimise. I suspect it was both.
I will never forget the hubub around the discovery that everything you typed on android went to a root shell. "What should I do?"... "reboot" phone reboots
The best think Jobs ever did for tech was forcing the whole industry to advance HTML to where it could replace Flash, and killing the market for proprietary browser content plugins. I don’t want to imagine what the web would be like today if Flash had won, and the whole web was a loader for one closed-source, junky plugin.
Adobe was in a unique position to dominate the apps era, but they failed spectacularly. They could have implemented payment/monetization options for their ecosystem, to build their own walled garden. Plugins were slow but this was mostly due to hardware at the time. This changed rapidly in the following years, but without control of the hardware, they had already lost the market.