Gambling aside, the median quality of a modern mobile game is worse than what we had on newgrounds.
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
Software in general is worse than it used to be 20 years ago. My conjecture is that as the software industry got bigger and bigger, the number of people who cared about doing good work stayed the same, which meant a higher percentage of work has been done by people who don't care. But regardless of the cause, quality in our industry is way down.
> Wasn't the main reason that it was really difficult to keep the sandbox secure?
It basically ran JavaScript. It's no harder to sandbox Flash than it's to sandbox any HTML5 website. Arguably much easier because there was no JIT back then. Flash also ran in an enclosed box on a website and had no access to DOM, which greatly lowers attack surface.
> I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.
WebAssembly is better compilation target and runtime than Flash ever was. Many languages can compile to WebAssembly.
I think what you want is an authoring tool like Flash. Why not make that tool? Or if you don't want to make it, Rive's a pretty good animation engine. You can make games with it:
Assuming you're not looking at the file sizes involved...
SWF is extremely compact, since it was intended to be used over a dialup connection. Flash worked because the player was preinstalled on the computer.
The newer Ruffle player is a 10MB download in addition to the actual flash file. You get a new freshly downloaded copy of Ruffle from every site that's hosting Flash content.
I have an old phone. I'm on one of the cheapest plans. I ran a speed test with https://speedtest.net and I got 124 megabits per second. That's 15 megabytes per second, 900 megabytes per minute, which is 90x more than YouTube's 1080p video rate of 10 megabytes per minute.
The swf player was definitely smaller, through some miracle — I remember marveling at how quick it was to install it the first time, and I’m pretty sure that’s a big reason Flash became so ubiquitous that you could just blindly assume its presence by 2002 or so - the install was small even for dial-up, and required like one click.
But compared to the average internet user’s connection speed or their consumed bandwidth at this time, 10MB is probably smaller. We just don’t put it in a plugin today because the browser cache can handle that just fine, and because it means the code is more sandboxed, and that if it needs updates, managing that is easy for the game publisher to do.
NG didn't have multiple 500MB downloads, buttons in the wrong place, pointless currencies. More importantly NG artists actually cared. I understand why Apple killed Flash, but what we got in its place is not better.