content: Everyone loved Flash. Apart from the obnoxious existence of the "rich media" full-screen landing page, Flash was the way to play online games, see funny amateur animation, and watch streaming video. The alternatives were limited to Java (a nightmare) and loading a URI in QuickTime or a similar player, which had a tendency to not work. Flash delivered rich content relatively quickly and painlessly and, better yet, amateurs could use the authoring tool to create their own games and animation.  In about 2009 or so everything started to move to smartphones due to the massive popularity of the iPhone. Immediately there were calls to get Flash into the mobile browser, as the original vision for the iPhone was to not have an app store and to deliver all content over the web...yet this meant no one could play games or watch video. At this point in time the users were entirely on the side of Flash.  Eventually Apple announced the App Store, then started making claims that Flash simply couldn't run on the iPhone (then later they changed this to "wouldn't"), despite Adobe having released versions of Flash for other mobile platforms already. Apple doubled down on their claims (outright lies mixed in with FUD about how touchscreen users would be confused, which had only a kernel of truth in it), and the real reason was simple: if Flash worked on the iPhone then it'd short-circuit the fledgling revenue model that Apple was trying to create. If users could play games and get rich web experiences in the open web, they wouldn't buy apps through the App Store, and therefore Apple wouldn't be able to get a cut, nor would they be able to control what people executed on their phones. This was the beginning of the walled garden. Instead of Flash Apple claimed that HTML5 was the future...at the time HTML5 was an almost entire unimplemented standard and couldn't do a tenth of the things Flash could, and it wasn't clear whether Flash or HTML5 would become important in the future web. Gradually, however, more and more developers stopped using Flash/Flex Builder/AS3 and downloaded XCode to deploy native applications to iPhone OS, then iOS and iPads. As users were more and more able to get the rich media experiences they were missing, and as HTML5 finally got more concrete, the tide turned. Flash became unnecessary, then Adobe eventually recognized they lost the fight and abandoned it. Over time it turned into a dirty word, and eventually it'll just fade away.  It's a shame to me on two levels: 1. walled gardens won, but if Flash had succeeded it would've given users more control over what code they could execute on their processors; 2. there doesn't seem to be a popular alternative to Flash for amateur animators and game developers. I loved Newgrounds.com and was inspired to use Flash by all the shit that those people made--I don't see anything similar today. Games all seem to be proprietary ,and if you want to developer for iOS devices you need to buy a Mac, use XCode, and pay Apple each year--as well as submit to censorship in the App Store.