Remember when the internet looked like this?
Then came 2010. Enter Steve Jobs: with a kingly decree, judgment was passed and Flash was pronounced dead. In his own words, Jobs made the case for Flash’s demise:
“The mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards — all areas where Flash falls short.”
His answer…apps. Lots of apps. And more apps.
“The 250,000 apps [in 2010] on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.”
Jobs was right: we were moving towards a different version of the internet, where the sometimes clunky and ill-adapted Flash experiences couldn’t keep up with the sleek mobile apps and web experiences designed for touch screens. What he didn’t address was the reason for Flash’s rise in the first place. Flash was a real way for anyone with an idea to create without the labyrinth of priorities, MVPs, and limited resources that IT imposes, which is where the App Store falls short. Creating a fully-coded app has a much higher barrier to entry than creating a similar online experience in Flash.
Essentially, Flash was great at unleashing creative talent to bring new ideas to life. What it wasn’t good at was performance. This is where we come in.
There are apps that deserve navigating the labyrinth, building a product roadmap, and gathering resources to develop. We love those apps. But, there’s also a class of interactive experiences that dedicating this level of production resources just doesn’t make sense for — such as ephemeral, rapidly changing, business efforts that are easily pushed down the priority list.
There’s an easy way to product these experiences quickly and without code to make them adaptive, app-like, and robust in a way that Flash creations were not. We call them microapps, and they have the power to transform communication.
Try it for yourself! Explore one of our microapps, or start a free trial to build your own.
Still using Flash? We want to hear about it, seriously. Tell us on LinkedIn or Twitter, and we might just have an upgrade to show you.
