Thoughts on Flash

If they're going to pitch HTML5 as an alternative to Flash (and, implicitly, the iPhoneOS API), then why not let them compete directly with Cocoa Touch apps? Why not offer HTML5 developers a way to take advantage of the App Store's monetization and discoverability? Apple already provides some amazing documentation and tutorials for making offline-capable mobile web apps, but they're still treated by Apple as the bastard cousins of "real" iPhone apps. They should buy or provide an officially-supported analogue…

Context: In the essay [0], Jobs suggested mobile app development on should focus on HTML5 (which is now called Progressive Web Apps / PWA) Apple has has been recently been rolling out anti-PWA practices [1]. Probably to reinforce their "walled garden". [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple... [1]: https://ionicframework.com/blog/is-apple-trying-to-kill-pwas...

To put it in context, this open letter was the month before Google's demo debacle at "Flash Camp" in May that year, when every attempt to demo Flash running on Android resulted in a browser crash. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/7709473/Disastro... A lot of the comments in that thread would have been posted before that.