BlackBerry never really supported Flash

Indulge me for a minute while I talk about two dead technologies.

Yesterday, Adobe finally announced the end for Flash, although it has been mostly dead for a few years now. This was driven largely by the lack of support on smartphones, and while the lack of Flash support on iOS is well known, BlackBerry quietly did very little to help Flash along.

In the early days of BlackBerry the browsers were underpowered and couldn’t really support HTML, let alone anything more powerful. BlackBerry started shipping a serious browser in 2008. Not only did it not support Flash, but it had javascript turned off by default. In 2010 (a few months after Steve Job’s letter), BlackBerry shipped their first webkit based browser. It also did not support Flash. All through this time, BlackBerry would publicly support Adobe, and then not ship anything on their phones.

In 2013 BlackBerry 10 was launched, and Flash support was finally included in the browser. However it was disabled by default. Less then two years later in early 2015 BlackBerry released OS 10.3.1 which removed support for Flash.

Despite almost a decade of standing behind Adobe Flash, BlackBerry only actually included it on their phones for a bit under two years, during which time it was always disabled by default. Furthermore, they did this years after everyone else had already moved on. Apple was far more straight forwards in their rejection of Flash, but BlackBerry did the technology no favors as well…