14 DAY TRIAL // iPhones and iPads have never supported Flash Player, and for many people, this was quite a major drawback, especially because Adobe’s software has long been quite a popular piece of software, with a large part of the web using it.
But Steve Jobs himself said the company had no intention to bring Flash to iOS, so at some level, this pretty much settled it.
But as it turns out, it’s not that Jobs didn’t want to have Flash on iPhone and iPad. Former Apple executive Scott Forstall, who left the company in 2012, offered a deposition in the Epic vs. Apple case, also spilling the beans on the work that Adobe and Apple did on Flash.
Flash already dead
Forstall says both Adobe and Apple wanted to bring Flash to iPhone and iPad, but the early builds were so bad that the Cupertino-based tech giant eventually gave up on the project.
“We did not ship Flash. We tried to make Flash work. We helped Adobe. We definitely were interested. Again, this is one where I thought if we could help make it work, this could be great. Flash has been such a problem because the way that it hooks into systems, it’s been a virus nightmare on Windows, even on the Mac. And when we got it running on iOS, the performance was just abysmal and embarrassing and it could never get to something which would be consumer value add,” the former Apple executive has been quoted as saying.
Flash Player is dead for good now, after Adobe officially discontinued it earlier this year, with all major browsers also giving up on it. So at some level, Apple was right not to support Flash on its flagship devices, though this doesn’t necessarily mean its customers still didn’t miss this popular piece of software.