Adobe AIR enables full-featured desktop and mobile applications to be developed with Flash and published for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Wii U, and Nintendo Switch.

[7] In the early 2000s, Flash was widely installed on desktop computers, and was often used to display interactive web pages and online games, and to play video and audio content.

[8] In 2005, YouTube was founded by former PayPal employees, and it used Adobe Flash Player as a means to display compressed video content on the web.

[9] Notable users include Nike, Hewlett-Packard (more commonly known as HP), Nokia, General Electric, World Wildlife Fund, HBO, Cartoon Network, Disney, and Motorola.

[19] Flex was upgraded to support integration with remote data sources, using AMF, BlazeDS, Adobe LiveCycle, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and others.

[25] Developers could create rich internet applications and browser plugin-based applets in ActionScript 3.0 programming language with IDEs, including Adobe Flash Builder, FlashDevelop and Powerflasher FDT.

[citation needed] Adobe AIR allows the creation of Flash-based mobile games, which may be published to the Google Play and Apple app stores.

[citation needed] Notable users of Flash include DHX Media Vancouver for productions including Pound Puppies, Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Fresh TV for Total Drama, Nelvana for 6teen and Clone High, Williams Street for Metalocalypse and Squidbillies, Nickelodeon Animation Studio for El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, Starz Media for Wow!

[33][38] As the Internet became more popular, FutureWave realized the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might challenge Macromedia Shockwave technology.

[33][failed verification] Microsoft wanted to create an "online TV network" (MSN 2.0) and adopted FutureSplash animated content as a central part of it.

Macromedia distributed Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share.

[43] Macromedia upgraded the Flash system between 1996 and 1999 adding MovieClips, Actions (the precursor to ActionScript), Alpha transparency, and other features.

As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform, adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint.

Flash MX 2004 (7) ActionScript 2.0 was released with this version, enabling object-oriented programming but lacking the easier "Script assist" method of writing code.

On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia[62] alongside its product line which included Flash, Dreamweaver, Director/Shockwave, Fireworks, and Authorware.

Adobe Flex Builder (built on Eclipse) targeted the enterprise application development market, and was also released the same year.

Flash Player 10 included an in-built 3D engine (without GPU acceleration) that allowed basic object transformations in 3D space (position, rotation, scaling).

[70] ActionScript 3.0 was released with this version, along with ActionScript Virtual Machine 2.0 (AVM2) for faster code execution and garbage collection[72] New programming features included: strongly typed variables with type safety, runtime errors, improved events, display list instead of "depth" system, and many new classes (Socket, ByteArray, Loader, RegExp, etc.).

Other features of Flash CS5 are a new text engine (TLF), new document templates, further improvement to inverse kinematics, new Deco tool effects, live FLV playback preview, and the code snippets panel.

For instance, the SWF file format documentation is provided free of charge[87] after they relaxed the requirement of accepting a non-disclosure agreement to view it in 2008.

Fifteen years later, WAP had largely been replaced by full-capability implementations and the HTML5 standard included more support for interactive and video elements.

Soon after Apple's criticism, Adobe demoed and released a beta version of Flash 10.1, which used available GPU hardware acceleration even on a Mac.

Macromedia also hired Middlesoft to create a freely available developers' kit for the SWF file format versions 3 to 5.

Scaleform GFx is a commercial alternative Flash player that features fully hardware-accelerated 2D graphics rendering using the GPU.

[140] Gnash runs on Windows, Linux and other platforms for the 32-bit, 64-bit, and other operating systems, but development has slowed significantly in recent years.

[169] AIR is a cross-platform runtime system for developing applications for mobile devices running Android (ARM Cortex-A8 and above)[170] and Apple iOS.

"[204] Adobe Flash Player has over 1078 CVE entries,[205] of which over 842 lead to arbitrary code execution, and past vulnerabilities have enabled spying via web cameras.

[210] Active moves by third parties to limit the risk began with Steve Jobs in 2010 saying that Apple would not allow Flash on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad – citing abysmal security as one reason.

[211] Flash often used the ability to dynamically change parts of the runtime on languages on OSX to improve their own performance, but caused general instability.

In July 2015, a series of newly discovered vulnerabilities resulted in Facebook's chief security officer, Alex Stamos, issuing a call to Adobe to discontinue the software entirely[212] and the Mozilla Firefox web browser, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari to blacklist all earlier versions of Flash Player.