Apple Tried To Help Adobe Bring Flash Onto iOS

Apple’s mobile devices have never supported Adobe Flash. In fact, it was one of the marketing strategies that Apple’s competitors used to use against the company back in the day. However, given where we are now with Flash, we suppose it all kind of worked out in the end, but it turns out that somewhere along the way, Apple had tried to help Adobe out.

According to the depositions of former Apple head of software engineering, Scott Forstall, in the ongoing Epic VS Apple case, it seems that at some point in time, Apple apparently tried to help Adobe bring Flash onto iOS devices. Apple in the past, or more specifically Steve Jobs, had publicly said that the company never had intentions of bringing Flash onto iOS devices as they believed that HTML5 was the future.

However, behind the scenes it was a slightly different story. According to Forstall, the company tried to work with Adobe, but due to the foundational issues with Flash, it did not happen. “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.”

Like we said, with Flash having been officially killed off, it all worked out in the end for Apple, but we have to wonder how the ecosystem would have looked like if Flash was supported by iOS devices back in the day.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones, Tablets
Tags: adobe, flash, iOS