Preservation of Adobe Flash

While still going strong in the early to mid-2010's, the beginning of the end of Adobe Flash fell upon the Internet community on 29 April of 2010, when Steve Jobs, then the CEO of Apple, wrote an infamous open letter explaining why he refused to permit the release of Adobe Flash on iOS. The letter criticized Flash's remarkable energy consumption, frequent computer crashes, poor performance on mobile devices, appalling security and lack of touch support, and stated that he wished to avoid "a third party layer of software coming between the platform and the developer", especially as Flash was, in his own words, a closed system by any definition, and allegedly no longer necessary to consume Internet media. 
The letter was widely accused of bias and of serving to support anticompetitive behaviour (As Apple quickly banned Flash applications and all "non-approved programming languages" from the App Store thereafter, nearly prompting an antitrust investigation until Apple changed course and reversed the policy) at the time, but in retrospect, most started to agree with Jobs's statements. The letter was pivotal in enabling the rise of HTML5 and commencing the downfall of Flash, with Newgrounds predicting its demise as early as that same year. Adobe Flash as a platform would ultimately be shut down by Adobe on 12 January 2021 (Except in mainland China, where it is still active. Enterprise users worldwide continue to receive support from Harman International until at least 2023), with all Flash content being blocked from execution through a kill switch.
As a result of this (ultimately justified) doom-mongering, several technically skilled Flash fanatics commenced a variety of efforts to preserve Adobe Flash and the decades worth of content created with it. As of 2022, the two leading efforts in the community are BlueMaxima's Flashpoint and Ruffle, although other projects also exist.
== Active projects ==
=== BlueMaxima's Flashpoint and Newgrounds Auditorium ===
The most relatively and comparably complete of all preservation projects are BlueMaxima's Flashpoint and its sister project Newgrounds Auditorium. Flashpoint packages over 100,000 games made using various platforms and plugins, like Flash but also Shockwave, HTML5, Java, Silverlight, Unity Web Player, 3D Groove GX, Alambik and many others, in a unified offline launcher, using a variety of technologies to make these games work perpetually. Newgrounds Auditorium meanwhile is a similar launcher for over 130,000 animations from Newgrounds, collected using a scrape of the site.
=== Ruffle ===
=== OpenFlash ===
=== Newgrounds Player ===
=== Lightspark ===
=== FlashPatch! ===
== Discontinued or deprecated projects ==
=== Gnash ===
=== Shumway ===
=== Swfdec ===
== Commercial solutions ==
Several commercial Flash emulators and players exist. While we do not explicitly recommend them, they still exist and hence deserve to be documented just as much as free solutions, as they are also related to Flash.
=== CheerpX===
=== swf2js ===
== Preservation of other platforms ==
=== Shockwave ===
==== ScummVM ====
=== Silverlight ===
==== OpenSilver ====
==== Moonlight (Discontinued) ====
=== Java ===
==== CheerpJ (Commercial) ====
Category:Software