Apple tried to bring Flash to iOS: a bitter failure

Currently, hearings are taking place in the United States that could be a landmark in Apple's history. The firm is in fact heard in the context of its conflict with the studio Epic Games, to which we owe the success of the video game Fortnite. Objective for the lawyers in charge of the case: to rule on the case of the title, which was purely and simply banned from the App Store following a circumvention of the 30% commission levied by Cupertino on all in-app purchases .

Among the witnesses called to the stand, Scott Forstall. If this name doesn't mean anything to you, know that it is nothing less than the former boss of software development at the Apple brand. Since replaced by Craig Federighi at the head of iOS, the engineer has been questioned about the activities of his company which investigators suspect of anti-competitiveness.

“Terrible“

During his interview with the legislators, the former CTO also had the opportunity to speak about Flash, an old standard which powered many animated websites for many years beforefinally left the market a short time ago. In particular, it was revealed that Apple had indeed considered deploying a version of this software on its devices, but without success.

Worse ; according to Forstall, the performance of this “virus nest” on iPhone were simply “terrible and embarrassing“. For those who master the language of Shakespeare, here are all of the comments in question which were reported by our American colleagues from9to5Mac:

We did not ship Flash. We tried to make Flash work. We helped Adobe. We definitely were interested. Again, this is one where I thought if we could help make it work, this could be great. Flash has been such a problem because the way that it hooks into systems, it’s been a virus nightmare on Windows, even on the Mac. And when we got it running on iOS, the performance was just abysmal and embarrassing and it could never get to something which would be consumer value add.