[thomasqbrady]

There are a lot of answers here I partially agree with, but there's an overarching concept that I think they're missing: there's no market for it. Adobe never stopped working on such a tool, as others have pointed out below, in that they still ship Flash's successor Animate. They kept Flex going as long as they could, too.

I think the reason people aren't terribly aware of Animate, and why there isn't a competitor product—whether open source or commercial—with a big name is that we don't need/want it. I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, but last I checked most web traffic was coming from mobile devices, and heavy, high-gloss interactions akin to what Flash afforded and what could be accomplished with WASM/WebGL are not what people want in their mobile browsing experience. They want fast. WASM/WebGL may be pretty efficient, and may be the best way to accomplish the sorts of things Flash was used for in much more efficient ways, but they're still not the best way to render text with a few buttons and images (i.e. a typical web page). The use-cases that had us reaching for Flash in the "aughts" just don't come up very often in web development these days.

When users DO want heavy, high-gloss interactive content, they're going to the App Store/Google Play to find it, not the web. This gives the developers the choice of building those experiences with WASM/WebGL if they like, but the vast majority are choosing native SDKs or a game engines. Against those options the WASM/WebGL offering is just not competitive, yet (the APIs, tooling, community is just not as good, yet).

[rchaud]

> I think the reason people aren't terribly aware of Animate, and why there isn't a competitor product—whether open source or commercial—with a big name is that we don't need/want it.

I disagree. I think the reasons Animate didn't take off are three-fold:

1) Developer Attrition from 2010-2015: HTML5/CSS3 features did not match 1:1 with what was possible in Flash alone. There was also far more fragmentation in mobile browser support than there was on desktop, making mobile compatibility a risk. Which leads us to:

2) Push to develop for native mobile platforms: Flash was a major game dev platform. If you wanted to sell games on iOS, you had to use their platform and nothing else.

3) Creators focused on video, not web: the 2000s were a great time for interactive content because the desktop web was the one medium through which everybody accessed information online. If you made a great Flash project, it'd find its way around the world. The 2010s changed that by putting Youtube and a cameraphone in everyone's hand. People were able to monetize videos in ways they never could with Flash, so that was another nail in its coffin.