The context of this story

Year: 2007
Products: iPhone

2008: The iPhone is a success. Adobe wants to be part of it.

In 2007, Apple redesigned its iPhone and began selling it in the middle of the year. At first, it didn’t seem like a problem that the phone didn’t support Flash, as virtually no mobile phone at the time did. Adobe assumed that mobile phones would be dominated by a stripped-down version called Flash Lite, which at the time was only available for the BREW platform, i.e., on the US market and partially in Japan. Under the impression of Apple’s iPhone announcement, Adobe presents Flash Lite 3 at the 3GSM Congress in Barcelona in February 2007, which is supposed to enable FLV video playback. The first version of the software is available at the end of the year and reaches phones in 2008. A more sophisticated version, Flash Lite 3.1, does not reach the market until February 2009.

But the main thing is that Apple doesn’t want Flash for the iPhone. Over the course of two years, when Flash for mobile phones didn’t really exist, web developers largely came to terms with the fact that if they wanted to make their websites interactive, they had to use the available features of the iPhone platform, which had also become dominant in the display of mobile websites. Even open source systems such as Wordpress offer enough plugins to customize a website for the iPhone with a single click, without the webmaster having to put in any extra work. When Adobe began protesting at the end of 2008 that Flash did not work on the iPhone, it was already difficult to explain to them what it could be used for. Mobile web developers had already learned to solve the problems that Flash could have solved in other ways. The iPhone became synonymous with mobile-friendly websites, and WAP became a reminder of a buzzword that had cost many people a lot of money.

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