Uber haunted by the ghost of Flash: your app doesn’t need an intro

Are you old enough to remember the bad old days of 2000–2004, when web designers everywhere learned some totally awesome Flash and couldn’t wait to deploy it on every project?

The reason for using Flash was simple: it was suddenly available nearly everywhere, and it could do things that plain old HTML+JavaScript in Microsoft’s stale browser could only dream of.

Macromedia, the company behind Flash (eventually acquired by Adobe), had been exceptionally adept at negotiating preload agreements for the Flash Player and its web browser plugin. By December 2001, Flash 4 was available on about 94% of desktop computers worldwide. This was an astonishing reach for a software runtime — it rivalled even Microsoft Windows.

The secret to Flash’s wide reach was that the companies preinstalling it didn’t perceive it as a software runtime. It was just a harmless little tool for lightweight web-optimized vector animation… Although one that happened to include a complete JavaScript-compatible programming language. (By 2007, the cat was out of the bag: Adobe was turning Flash into a real platform, and the competitors who had been haplessly preloading Flash had woken up. Apple refused to include Adobe’s runtime into iOS even though it broke much of the web at the time. But I digress…)

When Flash was suddenly available everywhere, designers saw their chance to make the web “come alive” and jumped on it. Instead of boring Verdana type and web-safe colors, you could now have full-screen animated content!

Of course, the problem was that most websites were simply displaying information and forms (just as today), so they didn’t actually need full-screen animated content anywhere. Hence the invention of the Flash intro. For 5–30 seconds, the user would watch something like a poorly produced TV commercial before entering the site. Although this was pitched to the client as “powerful branding”, it was really more about the web designer desperately wanting to use Flash somewhere. (I know — I did a few of those projects too back then. Guilty!)

It all seems silly now… But the ghost of the intro has never really left us. It’s been lurking all this time in mobile apps, which often feature a “splash screen” that displays the app’s logo and perhaps a fancy progress bar.

Never mind that Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines strongly recommend avoiding splash screens and instead jumping directly to the app’s content. These days clients actually demand splash screens because they’ve seen them on all the big-name apps and assume it’s a necessity.

When a company rebrands, the temptation to spend just a little more time showing the awesome new logo can be overwhelming. That’s what has happened to Uber. You can read about their totally amazing new design in The Verge’s article Uber’s app takes longer to open thanks to its new logo.

Here it is, courtesy of Ben Cunningham on Twitter… And if you’re an Uber user, be prepared to see this zoom-and-bounce-and-zoom-and-bounce sequence often. (It’s 7 seconds long but feels longer when you’re holding a phone.)

The rebirth of the Flash intro in 2016’s mobile apps is partly due to new tools. As Flash was the pretty face that unleashed a thousand ugly intros, beautiful new mobile-oriented prototyping tools such as Principle have a strong focus on animation.

The downside of having great new tools is that designers don’t yet know what to do with them. Just like websites in 2001, most mobile apps really don’t need that much animation. But when animation tools is all you have, everything looks like it could be bouncing and swooping just a little bit more.