What Was Flash & What Happened to It?

Flash is officially dead.

Adobe

Flash Was Everywhere

So what was Adobe Flash anyway?

It was common to find Flash content on video streaming platforms and websites offering online games.

The reality is that Flash was probably powering much of what you were doing.

Developers used it to create everything from web apps and games to videos and animations.

YouTube used Flash when it launched in 2005, and countless interactive tools and games required it.

Why Did Flash Shut Down?

Flash has been around since the ’90s.

The biggest reason was security.

It was in 2007 that users witnessed one of the first big nails in the coffin.

This was when Apple released the first iPhone, which from the very beginning has never supported Flash.

To make the content compatible with iPhones, YouTube and other sites had to abandon Flash.

This, along with security flaws, created a snowball effect where it slowly disappeared.

According to Adobe:

And that’s absolutely right.

HTML5 has replaced Flash and made it irrelevant as a multimedia playback standard.

In fact, some companies never used Flash or have been moving away from it for years.