Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
I'm the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that …
Context & Ripple Effects
Steve Jobs spent the first half of 2010 making the anti-Flash case from every available stage: his February iPad demo remarks about the missing browser plugin, and then an April open letter laying out why Apple blocked Flash outright on iOS. At D8 he condensed it all into one line for Walt Mossberg — 'Flash has had its day' — which plenty of observers, including this LAPTOP Mag reviewer, read as showmanship rather than engineering judgment.
What changed by August 2010 is the arrival of evidence from outside Apple's walled garden: Flash 10.1 had shipped on Android precisely so buyers could judge the argument on neutral ground, and the verdict per this review is that the player runs weak and unreliable there too. That makes Android the control group for the Jobs-Adobe dispute, and it is why the finding matters more than one reviewer's grumbling.
First-order effects
- Adobe loses its strongest counterargument in the Flash fight: 'wait for it on Android' was the rebuttal to Apple's block, and poor real-world performance on Android hands the argument back to Jobs.
- Android handset makers and carriers that marketed Flash support as a full-web differentiator against the iPhone now have a marquee feature that underdelivers on the devices customers actually hold.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and developers who delayed HTML5 or native-app work while waiting for mobile Flash to mature lose their reason to wait, shifting porting budgets toward formats both Apple and Google platforms render well.
- With its runtime struggling on friendly territory, Adobe comes under pressure to compete with tools and conversion paths rather than player ubiquity — a strategic retreat from 'Flash everywhere' toward making Flash content survive without the Flash player.
Third-order effects
- If Flash cannot deliver even on the platform that embraced it, the plugin-based web cedes mobile to native apps plus HTML5 media, letting Apple, Google, and browser vendors rather than Adobe set how video and interactive content ship.
- A pattern of platform owners winning format arguments through hardware defaults — not standards committees — would push future web technology disputes toward the same playbook Apple used here.
The trend: Mobile computing is settling the decade-old plugin question by attrition, with runtime performance on real devices — not vendor letters or keynote barbs — deciding which web technologies survive on phones.