Adobe drops Flash support on Mobile Devices

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Adobe Flash was the one feature missing on the iPad and iPhone that became an unnoficial rallying point for competitors whose products could 'run Flash', 'access the entire web,' and could  'watch thousands of videos.' Well those days are coming to a close as Adobe is focusing purely on desktop Flash and leaving the mobile space. Adobe will instead find ways to make HTML 5 the universal mobile dynamic media delivery service.

Here's what Adobe has to say.

"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," the company said in a  the company said in a blog post. "We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook."

Looks like in the end, Steve Jobs was right. Flash is a standard fit for PCs and for the desktop paradigm and while we've seen it work on various devices, it just isn't optimal. The problem now is how are all the Flash enabled devices going to work going forward, this is a cause for concern. People will be accessing the Internet on mobile devices more than on desktops and this is just going to continue.

Adobe is undergoing some major restructuring, they are laying off 750 employees as well as adopting new strategies to market and sell their products, they have to make tough choices on what to focus on and shifting from Flash to HTML 5 seems to be the smarter bet. But content, game and website developers on the Flash side aren't happy.

Aside from all the Flash video out there that will either be reencoded or left behind, there are a substantial number of websites from the past 12 years that are developed wholly in Flash. There are times I can't check a restaurant's menu or even get to the homepage using my iPad because it is in Flash, this might be a problem affecting more people as time goes by.

Here's more from Adobe:

"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 continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.  We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.  We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations."

And...

"We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash.  Together they offer developers and content publishers great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences across PCs and devices.  There is already amazing work being done that is pushing the newest boundaries, and we can’t wait to see what is still yet to come!"

Indeed, we can't wait either.