[baud9600]

I remember when Steve Jobs stood on stage and complained about Flash, how he hated its dominance of the free web, how it was a heavy and proprietary technology that prevented mobile devices from participating. His solution? To adopt the latest HTML standards… and also to build responsive apps. But now some apps have become heavy, advertising-bound, subscription nightmares. So it’s back to HTML, right?

[DonHopkins]

I want my lickable pixels back.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581424

[nolok]

They now make 30% of those, no matter the amount of effort, and that part of their business is growing fast in terms of revenues, so no I think even Steve Jobs wouldn't be reverting to html. He was not annoyed about the closed garden, he was annoyed that it wasn't his.

Another lesson here is about how Adobe screwed that up when they had control, but then again they never wanted Flash they just wanted to kill Macromedia, by the time someone woke up over there it was way too late and even Air was too little too late.

[CharlesW]

> He was not annoyed about the closed garden, he was annoyed that it wasn't his.

Those are reasonable guesses, but as someone who was at Apple at the time (in developer relations, with Adobe/Macromedia among my developers), neither of those were Steve's primary annoyances with Flash. The actual annoyances were that the Flash runtime was (1) slow and (2) very crashy compared to the Windows version.

The former mattered because it created/reinforced a perception that Macs were slow. The latter mattered because it created/reinforced a perception that Macs were unstable, and it created a lot of expensive support calls. (For quite some time, the Flash runtime was the #1 cause of Mac crashes.)

There's more to this story (Adobe was threatening Apple on other fronts), but IMO Steve did the right thing by responding to a toxic partner in the way that he did.