Puffin Web Browser and Puffin Academy will be discontinued on the iOS platform on July 1, 2019
It is a bittersweet feeling to announce Puffin Web Browser and Puffin Academy will be discontinued on the iOS platform on July 1, 2019.
Thanks Steve Jobs for launching the iPhone in 2007. I was still at Google when it happened. I bough the iPhone on the first day and my daughter dropped it and broke the screen the next day. She was probably the first iPhone customer breaking the iPhone screen. Apple replaced the iPhone free of charge. I was so thrilled with Apple’s customer service and vowed to return the favor by buying a new iPhone every year, which I did for the next 10 years. Apple’s goodwill pays off handsomely.
I was working on the “feasibility” of a cloud-based super-browser on OLPC (One Laptop Per Child). The launch of iPhone made me quit Google in 2009 to pursue the opportunity of a super-browser on “a big iPhone”. When Steve Jobs launched iPad in 2010, it was the greatest day of my startup life, knowing we shared the same vision on this big iPhone.
Puffin launched in December 2010, and it took off immediately in January 2011. Running Flash games on iPad was an instant hit. For the next few years, my main task was data center expansion. Growing from a handful of servers at Amazon and Rackspace to 10,000 servers at our own data centers in just a few years. We had a great time “making iPad great”. We launched Puffin Academy to help K12 students use iPad to access Flash based education websites at schools. Over the years, Puffin Academy surpassed 10 million users and helped Apple make $billions from iPad sales to schools.
All good things come to an end. Steve Jobs passed away shortly after the iPad launch and Puffin was treated as a competitor of Apple and Puffin update was banned by Apple a few years afterwards. Puffin revenue on iOS plummeted and vanished. Fortunately, Puffin surpassed 100 million users and 80% of the new users were from Android. We are committed to support iOS users the best we can but we are fully aware of that Puffin can’t last forever if Puffin can’t update. We wish Puffin apps never die, but it is a matter of time they just fade away.
Thanks Apple for the wonderful years. Sad to see Apple turn to the dark side. May the force be with you. Wish Apple can be great again.
