Steve Jobs, Thoughts on Flash, April 2010
But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards - all areas where Flash falls short. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs.
In addition, Jobs noted that Flash offers horrible battery life due to the lack of hardware decoding support, plus extremely poor handling of touchscreen user interfaces, since it was “designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers.” He also insisted that the cross-platform tool would result in a worse user experience for everyone, since it would leave developers building apps for the least common denominator, rather than those that would make the best use of the available hardware and features.įlash was created during the PC era - for PCs and mice. In fact, Jobs pilloried Adobe’s Flash platform in one of his famous but rare open letters, Thoughts on Flash, explaining the myriad problems with the “proprietary” nature of Adobe’s software and its poor reliability, security and performance, noting that it was “the number one reason Macs crash” and that Symantec had already cited Flash as having one of the worst track records for security.
