Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Not really. I mean, iPhones were slower than laptops back then but that’s not saying much as all phones were in the same ballpark at best. The actual reasons are well documented: it was a ressource hog (on all platforms, not only phones; there were still netbooks around), sucked batteries dry (including on both Windows and Mac laptops with much better batteries than phones), and was unstable (being the leading cause of crashes on Macs at the time). Jobs even wrote an open letter about it.

It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.




Eh. Jobs was disingenuous at the best of times, I had Flash Lite running fine on Symbian a year or so before the iPhone hit the market.

I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.)

He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: