Flash

Overview

Flash was the animation and interactive multimedia platform that defined the early visual web: it began as FutureSplash Animator, a small drawing-and-animation tool, became Macromedia Flash in 1996, passed to Adobe in the $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition of 2005, and was then shut out of the mobile era — most famously by Apple’s refusal to allow it on the iPhone — before Adobe ended support on December 31, 2020 (How-To Geek). At its peak Adobe said Flash was installed on 99 percent of internet-connected desktop PCs, yet by the end it could not make the jump to phones: the technology built for PCs and mice met an era of touchscreens, app stores and open web standards, and lost (BBC News).

A pen-computer sketch tool becomes the web’s stage

What eventually became Flash started as SmartSketch, a vector drawing application for pen computers released in 1993 by FutureWave Software; frame-by-frame animation was added and the app became FutureSplash Animator for Mac and PC (How-To Geek). Macromedia acquired FutureSplash in 1996 and split it in two: Macromedia Flash for creating animations, and Flash Player, which let anyone play those animations without paying — crucially, as a free web-browser plugin, so animations could run inside web pages (How-To Geek). The final piece arrived in 2000, when Flash 5.0 added the first version of the ActionScript programming language, so Flash content could be interactive — clickable menus, video players, complex web applications — and not merely animated (How-To Geek).

Distribution, not just technology, made Flash ubiquitous. Macromedia claimed that more than 98 percent of computers connected to the web in 2005 had Flash Player installed, and that same year Adobe purchased Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock, officially turning Flash into an Adobe product (How-To Geek). By 2009, Adobe said Flash was installed on 99 percent of internet-connected desktop PCs, and it had become the vehicle through which sites such as YouTube streamed video before HTML5 video matured (BBC News). For a generation of creators, Flash was the first tool that let a single person publish animation, games and interactive sites to a mass audience from a bedroom computer.

The iPhone, the FTC complaint, and “Thoughts on Flash”

Apple introduced the first iPhone in 2007 with a full Safari browser but no compatibility with web plugins, including Flash; chief executive Steve Jobs said in March 2008 that the mobile version of Flash was “not capable of being used with the web” (How-To Geek). Behind the scenes the two companies had already tried and failed: Apple engineering head Scott Forstall revealed in a deposition in the Epic Games v. Apple lawsuit that early efforts were unpromising — “We tried to make Flash work. We helped Adobe. We definitely were interested,” he said, but “when we got it running on iOS, the performance was just abysmal and embarrassing” (How-To Geek).

The public fight escalated through app-store rules. Just before Flash CS5 shipped in 2010, Apple’s iOS 4 software development kit restricted iPhone applications to Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript, blocking Flash-based toolchains; Adobe complained to the United States Federal Trade Commission, which began investigating Apple for possible antitrust violations, and by August 2010 had nearly 200 pages of records related to the complaint (How-To Geek). The confrontation culminated on April 29, 2010, when Jobs published his 1,685-word open letter “Thoughts on Flash,” saying Flash had too many bugs, drained batteries too quickly and was too oriented to personal computers to work on the iPhone and iPad (Associated Press). He cited “reliability, security and performance” and the fact that Flash was designed “for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers,” and argued that the most important reason was structural: Flash put a third party between Apple and software developers, so developers could benefit from Apple’s improvements only if Adobe upgraded its own software (Associated Press).

Adobe’s chief executive Shantanu Narayen had answered differently a month earlier, saying in a March 23, 2010 conference call that Adobe was “committed to bringing Flash to any platform on which there is a screen” and that the ban had “nothing to do with technology” (Associated Press). Jobs closed by arguing that HTML5 would win on mobile devices and PCs, and that “perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind” (Associated Press). Apple relaxed its developer rules in September 2010, allowing tools including Flash provided resulting apps did not download code, but by then the momentum had shifted: more sites supported HTML5 video or offered native mobile apps, and Adobe discontinued Flash Player for all mobile devices in 2011 (How-To Geek).

Security decline and the coordinated end

On desktop, Flash’s problem became security. Apple used its malware protection system to block Flash Player from running on Mac nearly every time a vulnerability was discovered, and Computerworld describes “the security disaster Flash had become earlier in the century, the endless rounds of patching security vulnerabilities, often the worst ‘zero-day’ kind,” which pushed content makers, former partners and users away (How-To Geek; Computerworld). In July 2017 Adobe formally announced it would retire Flash, stop updating and distributing the player at the end of 2020, and encourage migration to open formats, arguing that HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly had matured into “a viable alternative for content on the web” (Computerworld). Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla published their own removal roadmaps alongside Adobe’s announcement (Computerworld).

The end itself was precise and public. Adobe issued its final scheduled Flash Player update on December 8, 2020, would no longer support Flash Player after December 31, 2020, and blocked Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021 (Computerworld). Browsers followed in January 2021 — Chrome 88 removed Flash entirely, Firefox 85 shipped without Flash support, Safari 14 lacked any capability to run Flash content — and Microsoft purged Flash from Windows through Windows Update (Computerworld). The human cost of the cutoff was visible immediately: Zynga closed the original version of FarmVille on New Year’s Eve 2020 after eleven years because it relied on Flash to run (BBC News). Preservation, however, began at once: the open Ruffle project works to play Flash content in a browser without a plugin, and the Internet Archive was hosting more than 2,000 Flash items (BBC News). Adobe also partnered with Harman to provide post-retirement Flash support and security updates, with Harman saying it could provide solutions “until the end of 2023 and beyond” (Computerworld).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not claim that Steve Jobs’ letter alone killed Flash: the documented sequence includes a failed iPhone port, an FTC investigation, Adobe’s own 2011 mobile withdrawal, years of security failures, and a coordinated 2017–2021 browser retirement, and the letter’s causal weight cannot be isolated from those co-causes. It does not merge the 98 percent (2005) and 99 percent (2009) installation figures into one peak number, since they come from different claimants in different years. It does not give a precise month for the FutureSplash acquisition, which the Macromedia histories dispute. And it does not claim Flash is entirely gone: emulators such as Ruffle and archive collections keep much Flash content playable, but that preservation is not Adobe-supported Flash, and no claim is made here about the security or fidelity of any particular emulator.