Coincidentally, at the time Apple was doing their best to kill Flash, there was a thriving ecosystem of "social games" on Facebook minting tons of money from exposing massive audiences to small transactions that were unplayable on iPhone without Flash.
Apple always maintained it was for technical reasons but eventually banned transpiling entirely to prevent Flash being used at all for app development, a process that produces native apps from other languages and was working well enough. It's pretty ordinary to do that today targeting a lot of platforms with various languages.
These days they openly violate EU and US law to maintain their fees on many of the same games that were on Facebook, and are on regulators radar for many things they do to prevent anything like Facebook Games ever emerging outside their control.
So I wonder how much of this was simply them anticipating another billion people - millions of big-spender "whales" - would be coming online.
PaulHoule•9h ago
Performance of Flash was awful on mobile.
I think the greatest thing Adobe accomplished was making video practical on the web without users installing plug-ins. There was this great war which is now largely forgotten by Microsoft and Real Player and a few others: you could publish video on the web in 1999 but you'd probably have to encode it for three different clients and give people links to where to go install one if they didn't have it.
I think browser vendors didn't perceive Flash as a video client that was part of the war so it managed to get 100% deployment so you didn't have to be a "plughead" and ask people to install something knowing only 20% of people would -- it made YouTube possible and the rest was history.
Now Facebook put an end to those social games. It used to be you could get free publicity by spamming every event in a player's game to all of their friends. It wasn't just annoying, under
Facebook realized its business was selling people's attention and they weren't about to let the likes of Zynga get attention for free.
benoau•9h ago
> Performance of Flash was awful on mobile.
Of course, in fact I watched Adobe unveil the final iterations of their mobile Flash Player plugin at conferences it was simply garbage. But then they shifted away from the plugin model to transpiling to produce native apps and it became much more viable, till Apple banned it and the entire industry had to stop using Flash in their projects entirely to support mobile.
Facebook didn't kill those games, as smartphones exploded in popularity the users shifted away from playing on school and work computers to playing on their phones, which precluded playing them on Facebook.
jasonthorsness•9h ago
Flash was amazing to work in because it had a rich animation and graphics system that was also very accessible to beginners. I’m not sure there’s anything quite like it even today - everything seems to require more setup and complexity in construction and deployment. I get why Apple killed it but it would have been nice if there had been some more direct continuity.
benoau•9h ago
Apple always maintained it was for technical reasons but eventually banned transpiling entirely to prevent Flash being used at all for app development, a process that produces native apps from other languages and was working well enough. It's pretty ordinary to do that today targeting a lot of platforms with various languages.
These days they openly violate EU and US law to maintain their fees on many of the same games that were on Facebook, and are on regulators radar for many things they do to prevent anything like Facebook Games ever emerging outside their control.
So I wonder how much of this was simply them anticipating another billion people - millions of big-spender "whales" - would be coming online.
PaulHoule•9h ago
I think the greatest thing Adobe accomplished was making video practical on the web without users installing plug-ins. There was this great war which is now largely forgotten by Microsoft and Real Player and a few others: you could publish video on the web in 1999 but you'd probably have to encode it for three different clients and give people links to where to go install one if they didn't have it.
I think browser vendors didn't perceive Flash as a video client that was part of the war so it managed to get 100% deployment so you didn't have to be a "plughead" and ask people to install something knowing only 20% of people would -- it made YouTube possible and the rest was history.
Now Facebook put an end to those social games. It used to be you could get free publicity by spamming every event in a player's game to all of their friends. It wasn't just annoying, under
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheryl_Sandberg
Facebook realized its business was selling people's attention and they weren't about to let the likes of Zynga get attention for free.
benoau•9h ago
Of course, in fact I watched Adobe unveil the final iterations of their mobile Flash Player plugin at conferences it was simply garbage. But then they shifted away from the plugin model to transpiling to produce native apps and it became much more viable, till Apple banned it and the entire industry had to stop using Flash in their projects entirely to support mobile.
Facebook didn't kill those games, as smartphones exploded in popularity the users shifted away from playing on school and work computers to playing on their phones, which precluded playing them on Facebook.