Adobe Flash player was a platform that allowed us to watch videos and interact with games on a site. But in 2010 it was a battle cry for android. This was what android fans used to combat their apple friends on one of the reasons android was better.
In January of 2010, about two months after the release of the Motorola Droid, Adobe uploaded a Youtube video showing off Flash on a mobile browser. This was big because it signified mobile browsers moving closer to the capabilities of desktop browsers. Before that time sites utilized the WAP (wireless application protocol) for mobile devices. But as mobile devices continued to improve we started (officially) seeing browsers and sites improve mobile browsing. Unofficially we saw mobile browsers, like Dolphin Browser, allow phones to change their user agent to a Desktop profile. This meant that sites would show up on phones just like they did a desktop computer.
Unfortunately, if you owned an iPhone you did not get this option. Apple’s stance was that the future was HTML 5. It would be the new standard of browsing and they had adopted it early. Steve Jobs even wrote a long letter on Apple’s stance on Flash.
Fast Forward to now, where Google Chrome will remove the option for users to use Adobe Flash Player in the latest update (69). Almost 8 years later Adobe Flash Player is no longer a thing and web pages are now adopting HTML 5.
So was Apple right?
It appears so, as the new standard now is HTML 5. In fact Adobe will be discontinuing support for their Flash Player in two years (2020). Adobe themselves are telling users to adopt the new standard. In fact not only Adobe, but other companies such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have joined Apple for the open sourced HTML 5.
In an age now when more data is consumed on phones than desktops, it is considered normal that a webpage pulled up on iPhone, Android, desktop, and tablet all look the same. I am reminded of how it was before. When there was this push to get phone browsers to look and act like computer browsers. And when Flash was a big part of that being the case for android browsers.
