Ask HN: Why wasn't Adobe able to make Flash run well on smartphones?

Define runs well.<p>My macbook is silent until I visit a site with a flash banner at which point the cpu fan comes on. That tells me that flash does something computationally intensive even when displaying what looks like a 4 frame movie with a button that prompts me to click to the next destination. The time between loading a page and hearing the CPU fan come on depends on how ad-laden the page is. While my machine doesn't lag and Chrome Canary will occasionally lag a little when scrolling those pages the first time, I'd have to say that translates to high cpu utilization which would kill a phone's battery pretty quickly.<p>The other problem was focus - most flash games used the mouse pointer for directional control. The mouse pointer doesn't exist on a phone and a tap would correspond to a mouse click. Redesigning Flash to deal with those issues on web pages where HTML5 solves many of those issues convinced Adobe to concentrate on Air, and leave webapps to HTML5.<p>Flash won't disappear overnight, but, new development ceased. Whether they make it support GPUs before relegating it to a 'security release only' update policy is hard to say.<p>Personally, I have removed flash from my macbook and only Chrome/Chrome Canary(my primary browser) can even see Flash enabled pages/sites. Months ago it was very irritating when the version of flash bundled with Canary would crash on one page and violate the sandbox causing google.com/music to crash as well.<p>*still amazed at the irony of using Flash for google.com/music :)

"current smartphones (iPhone 4S and the latest Android phones) should have more computing power than my laptop 5-7 years ago."<p>It depends on what you compare. Even if the CPU is fast, its speed is there to work less, not to be 100% all the time. See:<p><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/2782/2" rel="nofollow">http://www.anandtech.com/show/2782/2</a><p>"although the system may require 3 watts or so to "hurry up", the power consumption goes down near .25 watts when idle. By averaging these two numbers, one can quickly see how quick start can extend battery life"<p>There are Flash-based ads that push CPU use to 100% on 6 years old computers for all the time you're looking at the page with contains them.<p>Second, the video decoding on the phones is done not in the main CPU -- there's a hardware decoder. If Flash video content is not suitable for the hardware decoder, Flash code has no chance to be efficient. Again, 100% CPU use.

"As Steve Jobs put it: “Flash was designed for PCs using mice”—which is true. When Flash was created back in the 90′s, the target platform that it was designed for, was the PC. Flash was designed for desktop computers, computers with a fast CPU and a power-cable. This is the root cause of all the hardships Adobe has had with mobile."<p>read the rest of the article here - <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/why-adobe-failed/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/09/why-adobe-failed/</a><p>explains everything super well!

I think the underlying (and completely unsolvable) problem boils down to user experience. There are myriad flash apps out there with atrocious hover-state-based interfaces that are annoying on PC, and would be completely unusable on a touch screen device. Activating flash on a mobile device would open the floodgates to countless apps that simply wouldn't work, without providing context to the user as to <i>why</i> they don't work. In such a situation, it is simpler to control the user experience by simply not allowing flash.