Flash is dead and Adobe is a still a shi**y partner.” “However, the decision was the right one based on both technical reasons and that Adobe was a shi**y partner. Almost a decade later, it turns out that Steve Jobs was right. “One of the things that has irked me over the subsequent years was that people widely ridiculed Steve for this decision,” Burrough later added. I personally used Pandora's Flash client.īurrough went on to fire off a series of tweets which provides us with a fascinating look into Jobs’ mindset at the time.Īccording to Burrough, Jobs was miffed that Adobe CEO “Shantanu Narayen would not take his phone calls.” As a result, Jobs had zero faith that Adobe would be able to address what Jobs reportedly categorized as “mere engineering problems.” In 2008, Apple tested support for Flash on iPhone. What’s more, Burrough relays that Jobs’ vehement refusal to support the technology may have had less to do with security considerations and more to do with the fact that Adobe, as a partner, couldn’t be relied upon to address said security issues. That said, a series of tweets from Bob Burrough, a former software development manager at Apple, reveals that Apple at one point actually tested Flash on the iPhone as far back as 2008. In hindsight, thanks to no shortage of Flash-related problems on Android, it’s commonly accepted that Apple’s decision to avoid Flash like the plague was a shrewd one.
