But the creation tools and the culture never really lined up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps instead.
For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior. iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place even on desktop.
I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of openness, and the downsides of worse performance and platform integration and the lack of an easy payment rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on desktop today.
We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early App Store, which happened in large part because of the ease of making money. There would probably be more focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so.
(I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal experience isn't really an argument).
ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash could have been.
No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer
As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a well-designed and relatively reliable platform (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that.
And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).
My kingdom for some way of gatekeeping platforms so that entities like this are forbidden from participating
- Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web viable and competitive against traditional media.
- You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea.
- Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any gatekeeping.
- Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care. Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent" also rarely care. Still better than having no access to the timetables.
Unfortunately every peabrained enterpreneur saw that and began eroding the moat until it was gone. The knowledge required to build things has been on a steady decline, and now with AI that decline has completely destroyed it. Now, every fucking hack with an "idea" is not only able to act on them but now they act like they are as good as the people who paid a heavy price to get to the same level through years of study and hard work.
Seriously? Is that why I ran all my desktop browsers with flashblock even before the iPhone was out?
Dare to tell me Adobe was feverishly working in secret on reducing pointless CPU usage and saving my battery?