One of his arguments, and not the most important one. Looking at https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F..., he says the most important reason is that Apple doesn’t want Adobe to be in control of a major API on iPhones (he buries that’s the main reason somewhat by mentioning it last because, I think, he knew that argument is more “because it’s good for Apple” than “because it’s good for our users”)
Yes, he mentions reliability, battery life, security, too, but those are things Adobe (in theory) could have fixed.
He also mentions Flash isn’t open. Again that is is something Adobe could have fixed, but I doubt they were fully willing to do that at the time
The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
Only when jailbreaking and custom apps got very successful, Apple introduced official app support and the appstore.
Remember back in 2007 when Apple first told developers that to develop for the iPhone, they’d need to build WebApps for Safari? Well, that really was the plan. At the time, Jobs said:
The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services. They can make a call, they can send an email, they can look up a location on Google Maps.
And guess what? There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.
https://9to5mac.com/2011/10/21/jobs-original-vision-for-the-...
Jobs hated Adobe:
According to the biography, Jobs’ longstanding animus toward Adobe helped form his vision for Apple’s tightly controlled mobile environment.
In 1999, he was flatly denied when he asked Adobe to create a version of its popular Adobe Premiere digital-graphics software for the Mac. Adobe also wouldn’t rewrite Photoshop for the Mac’s operating system, even though Macs were popular with designers.
“My primary insight when we were screwed by Adobe in 1999 was that we shouldn’t get into any business where we didn’t control both the hardware and the software, otherwise we’d get our head handed to us,” Jobs said, according to Isaacson.
The two companies go back together even further. Apple invested in Adobe in 1985 and they worked together early on. But Jobs, who in Isaacson’s book comes off sometimes as vindictive and brusque as he was innovative and inspirational, told Isaacson that Adobe went downhill after founder John Warnock retired.
“The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left,” he said. “He was the inventor, the person I related to. It’s been a bunch of suits since then, and the company has turned to crap.
https://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/09/tech/mobile/flash-steve-j...
Very OT, but can I say i’ve seen this happen at every company i’ve been? When the founder(s) get out of the picture they kinda bring the soul of the company with them.
Yeah there’s a fading halo still in the air for a while, but it’s just that: a fading halo.
I bounced around a lot between the three OSes at that time, and Flash was bad enough on the other two that I would almost automatically reach for Windows when I had to use it.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/app-store-ecosystem-r...
Then again, they chose to use those exact words in their webpage, so you decide how large a grain of salt to take.
Why not? Flash was objectively an awful experience on mobile, and the iPhone was entirely about good UX.
> I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.
Initially the iPhone didn't even have an app store. They wanted everyone to make HTML5 apps.