14 DAY TRIAL //
The world is now giving up on Adobe Flash Player for HTML5, mostly in an attempt to get better performance, improved security, and fewer bugs, but Apple is actually one of the first companies that tried to stay away from this particular tech.
Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs criticized Flash Player on several occasions and even posted an editorial piece to explain why Adobe’s solution didn’t have a future on mobile devices, even though Android rushed to embrace it.
In just a few words, Steve Jobs claimed Flash wasn’t designed to be a mobile technology and it lacked all the features that could have helped it run smoothly on smartphones, including battery optimizations and support for touchscreens.
But despite all of these, it turns out that the iPhone never supported Flash because of a completely different reason.
Steve Jobs called Adobe’s CEO
Former Apple employee Bob Burrough revealed in a series of tweets that Steve Jobs actually wanted to fix all the problems that Flash Player had at that time, so he wanted to get in touch with Adobe specifically to optimize the solution for mobile devices.
But for some reason, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen “would not take Jobs’ phone calls, and without an open dialog with them, he couldn’t count on them to do it.”
So given the technical issues that Flash Player already had at that time, combined with the lack of communication that Adobe proved, Apple decided to stay away from a software solution that these days everyone seems to be abandoning.
“One of the things that has irked me over the subsequent years was that people widely ridiculed Steve for this decision. However, the decision was the right one based on both technical reasons and that Adobe was a s***y partner,” the former Apple employee said. “Almost a decade later, it turns out that Steve Jobs was right. Flash is dead and Adobe is a still a s***y partner.”
So there you go, not only that Steve Jobs was right, and Flash Player doesn’t make sense on mobile (and on PCs) because of its issues, but he actually wanted to work with Adobe on improving it for smartphones. And no, it’s not Steve Jobs’ fault for not having Flash on iPhones.