The death of mobile Flash

One of the important episodes that took place in 2010 and had a fundamental impact on the mobile world was the little-noticed but significant battle between Adobe and Apple, often referred to as Flash versus HTML5.

Apple and Adobe have a long-standing relationship full of hostility, spite, and mutual need. In the past, Apple needed Adobe more, but the situation has changed. And so Apple is letting the Flash king know it. A few days before the release of the CS5 package in 2010, it cut off its development tool for the iPhone and refused to allow Flash on its mobile platform. With its concentrated resistance, Apple ultimately pushed mobile Flash into oblivion, not only on its platform, but also forcing Adobe to give up and lean toward HTML5, around which Apple builds its systems. Why all this?

Let’s start from the beginning. Relations between Adobe and Apple have been tense for more than ten years, and there are many reasons for this. One of them is the long-standing disagreement over how to do graphics on the web—not just images, but interactive and vector graphics. Flash won out, was subsequently bought and further developed by Adobe, and today few people remember that it was Apple that promoted Quicktime technology, now known mainly for playing movies. This was the first technological hiccup, but Microsoft, Sun, and others were also involved in the battle at the time, so the animosity could have faded away as a normal part of business competition if it hadn’t been fueled by further events.

When Steve Jobs and Apple launched the new Mac OS X operating system in 2001 as a completely new generation of operating system for Apple computers, a significant snag arose. Adobe refused to port most of its applications to this operating system. This was despite the fact that Apple’s programmers were willing to provide significant assistance, as Apple considered the presence of Adobe software packages to be crucial. Rightly so, as the computers were used by graphic design professionals, and it would have been difficult to explain to them that they would have to wait to use native applications.

Since the launch of the new operating system, it has been necessary to address the use of Adobe applications, which ran (often after modifications) in Classic emulation mode. Native Photoshop 7 for Mac OS X was not available until March 2002, and when it was released, the software contained a large number of bugs and was underpowered; the porting was simply unsuccessful. Of the other Adobe applications, the ones that compete with other applications are ported first. For example, in 2004, users finally got the Premiere video editing package with Mac OS X support, but this was in response to Apple’s move. A year earlier, Apple had offered a cross-upgrade, offering Premiere users a transition to Final Cut Express, Apple’s own professional editing software, or a $500 discount voucher for the purchase of Final Cut Pro. The reason was not so much to gain new customers for FinalCut, but rather to appease angry Mac users who had to run Adobe Premiere editing software in emulation, which was slow and uncomfortable.

However, there are also problems with programs such as Adobe Acrobat for working with PDFs and Flash, which for many years had numerous performance and security issues on Mac (the latter also affected Flash on other platforms), and Steve Jobs often complained about its poor results. Adobe partially remedied the situation in 2009, but only really did so with the release of Flash 10. A well-documented event serves as an example. For several months (September 2008 – fall 2009), Adobe did not respond at all to reports of a serious bug in Flash Player 9 and 10 that caused it to crash (and in some cases, the web browser as well) on all supported platforms after certain code was executed.

In 2004, Adobe introduced software packages only for the Windows platform, such as the 3D animation software Atmosphere. The lack of Mac versions was justified by the fact that there were not enough users for such programs. For programs such as Photoshop Album or Encore DVD, Adobe stated that similar programs already existed on the Mac OS X platform and therefore there was no reason for them to introduce their own.

The years-long delay in launching professional packages was not only a huge loss for Apple, but also an inspiration, because it was at that time that the company had to start focusing on the segment of ordinary customers who did not mind the absence of an expensive graphics package that they would not have bought anyway. The result of this forced change in strategy, when Apple failed to purchase any package capable of competing with Photoshop or to force Adobe to release a native version of Photoshop, was a greater focus on music, photos, multimedia, and the needs of home users, which we can see today as Apple’s main asset, but at the time meant significant financial losses.

In 2006, Apple announced its transition to the Intel platform, and again the question was when and how Adobe would release its programs in a native version for Intel architecture. According to Apple, it was just a matter of making minor adjustments and recompiling the software with Apple’s free compiler. Adobe refused, arguing that it wasn’t that simple. Its CS2 and Studio 8 packages would only work on Intel in Rosetta emulation mode, which meant a dramatic drop in speed and essentially made them uncompetitive with the Windows versions.

Adobe won the first battle with its uncompromising stance. We can only speculate about the reasons for this stance today. Was it deliberate hostility, or did the company assess Mac OS X as a platform with no long-term prospects, or were there genuine technological difficulties? We don’t know for sure today. Adobe has always commented on the situation by saying that it releases its software packages independently of new versions of Mac OS X, which is understandable on the one hand, but on the other hand, Adobe was able to adapt when new versions of Windows were released. Was this a lack of foresight or a deliberate strategy?

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The death of mobile Flash

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