Adobe today formally announced that it would discontinue development of Flash on the mobile browser. In a post on Adobe's conversations blog titled "Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5," Danny Winokur of Adobe, confirmed the news, which was first reported by ZDNet.
The announcement said:
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.
The announcement nowhere mentions the unsatisfactory performance of Flash on mobile browsers, and instead says that HTML5 is increasingly becoming capable of doing what Flash was able to do. While the latter is true, almost all reviewers of Flash enabled phones have pointed out that the plugin results in degradation in scrolling performance and dropped video frames.
Adobe will continue working on their cross compiler which helps Flash developers to build native applications that run on iOS devices.
As Steve Jobs had said on multiple occasions defending Apple's decision to not allow Flash on iOS devices, Adobe failed to show Apple a working Flash build on iOS (or any mobile device) with satisfactory performance. In his "Thoughts on Flash" open letter, Jobs outlined six major issues with Flash, which at that time may not have been apparent, but in hindsight seem very correct.
Interestingly, there are questions being raised over the future of Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Flash, as well. Microsoft, just like Adobe, had said sometime back, that the future of the web on mobile as well as PCs was in HTML5.
What this trend shows is, as HTML5 gets more mature, Flash's (and other plugins') importance on the PC would go on decreasing, to the point where Adobe would have to make a similar announcement for all browsers. This won't be anytime soon though, since HTML5 is still in development stages and would take many years to finalize.
While Google tried to incorporate Flash in Android and marketed it as one of its unique selling points, Apple realised quite early that Flash was designed for PCs and not suitable for mobile devices and decided not to support it to ensure that users don't have to experience the degraded performance on iOS devices. Kudos to Steve Jobs and Apple for seeing the demise of Mobile Flash even before its creators.
[via Adobe]
Wonder how android fan boys will react now.
They can’t react with a huge boot in there mouths.
I will tell u how i react to it…. By going to watch a falling skys episode off the tnt website and b thankfull that i finally switched to a way better os..
I still think there should be an option to enable flash for iphone users.
Not even Adobe thinks so anymore. I’m betting they, as well as everyone at Apple, are much smarter.
I think apple’s objective was to rid the web of adobe flash and have everyone to transition to HTML5 so you may see how that would conflict with their interests. Also, flash is and always was buggy with security flaws and a battery hog and not to mention probably would make it easier to jailbreak which apple doesn’t want to make easier.
This goes to show that Steve was always right from the beginning about flash. What a smart man he was.
There is a bit of history when Adobe tried to mess around with Apple by releasing their new software versions on Windows first & delay the mac versions. Steve Jobs waited for his appropriate time to give it back to Adobe……. Even though Steve justified the superiority of HTML5 over Flash then while dropping Flash.
It was foolish enough for Adobe not to acknowledge the superiority of HTML5 then; rather when Apple dropped it from IOS, Adobe displayed arrogant statement that they care a damn! rather foresee the future in Mobile platform.
Now when they lost ground to Apps developers embracing HTML5, it didn’t make any economic sense for Adobe, thus announcing to stop Flash from the Mobile platform as they are not at mercy to serve the other 101 devices.
Did Jobs call it or did he call it? Nice Jobs, RIP
More like he caused it. And i’m thankful for it. (i’m a droid and iphone user). Flash has always sucked. No one with any sense ever thought otherwise.
Got us there Jobs. . .
Its funny how every one with a android phone would try and put down the iPhone by saying “iPhone’s suck, they don’t even support flash”.
pwnd
There you go, even Adobe gave in to Apple.
I think not supporting flash on iDevices was NOT a performance issue, specially if you are comparing it with HTML5 that runs slower than flash on iDevices.
It was clearly a bussiness decision. One of the major reasons why Steve jobs (RIP) did not want to support flash was because he will lose sales on the Apple store (a lot of apps that do simple stuff could be done in flash and they won’t be getting the 30% comission). I really think that it is a bad decision for the end users to ban flash player on smartphones, but it is a good one for Apple. So, I totally agree with you guys, Steve Jobs was a really smart guy because he knew how to make money but not for getting rid of flash on his iDevices.
And by the way, I own an iPhone.
The issue here is dumb people like you still believe flash for mobile possible while its owner has tried in vain . They still try to keep face so dumb wishers can keep their hope to live on.
i think you’re mistaking Jobs motivation. it has *never* been primarily about money.
he was obsessive about “experience” of which performance is a major component.
flash is really poor anachronistic tech that’s been pushed along *way* beyond it’s ability.
RIP flash mobile
what are you talking about? are you saying people would use a flash based web app instead of an app store version of the app? lmao! who in their right mind would that?!
Anybody that does not want to download a program the hogs up space and relastate for a simple little thing they could with flash.
In my opinion, flash doesn’t really stand a chance against HTML5. The mobile environments seem a bit too sophisticated for the older tools.