why adobe flash is no longer being used? For that matter what does it even do ??
In: Technology
Other people have covered the what was it aspect, I’ll cover why it’s no longer being used. I worked at Apple when a lot of this was happening.
When Apple was developing the iPhone, they wanted to provide the best mobile computing experience they could. At the time, something like 90% of desktop Safari crashes originated in the Flash plugin, and it was a driver for calls to AppleCare, which was costing Apple money. And because it was a buggy mess, it was a primary vector for malware and other noxious code that wanted to gain access to your computer.
And it sucked power like nobody’s business, a Flash supporting browser could drain a laptop battery in a few hours; translated to a phone with a much smaller battery you’d need to plug the phone in by noon, which was something that was going to cause a PR shitstorm if the iPhone shipped that way.
All this probably wasn’t helped by the fact that there were engineers on the Apple payroll whose job was basically to babysit Adobe and try to clean up their buggy mess.
So the decision was made to not support Flash on iOS. It got a lot of criticism at the time, and Android actually tried to use “we support Flash” as a marketing point, but they ran hard into the battery drain issue and it got quietly shunted aside.
With mobile refusing/effectively unable to support Flash, and with an increasing percentage of website views coming from mobile platforms, Flash became less viable for websites: they’d be cutting off a lucrative chunk of their potential market since Apple users are more likely to pay for other things too. They could still use it for desktop systems, but they’d need to provide a mobile version too which doubled their workload, so a lot of them just dropped Flash in favor of the new HTML 5 which was adding support for a lot of things Flash had been used for, like video.
And that’s how and why Flash died.
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