HTML5 Reigns Supreme as Adobe Axes Flash Mobile Player

Earlier this week, Danny Winokur, VP of Interactive Development at Adobe announced that Adobe would no longer be supporting the Flash Player for mobile devices. Straight from the Adobe blog:

“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.”

One day later, Adobe announced that they would not be supporting Flash for connected devices (like HDTV’s) either.

This comes as the conclusion to a longer narrative involving every big name in mobile. Adobe famously fought Apple for refusing to support Flash on the iPhone claiming that no one, not even Apple, could survive without supporting Flash. Steve Jobs pointed to buggy nature of the platform, security issues and the burgeoing HTML5 platform in his defense of Apple. Google jumped on the opportunity and issued full fledged Flash support on Android. This became a solid selling point for Android as they positioned themselves as the anti-Apple, hailing open access and less draconian restrictions.

Steve Jobs anticipation of HTML5’s rise to preeminence was, as it seemed to be so often, spot on. Developers and consumers alike have embraced the HTML5 platform which allows for seamless web apps that now rival native apps in terms of both function and aesthetic. Winkour conceded directly to HTML5 later in his blog post:

“HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms..”

He went on to issue Adobe’s full support of HTML5, saying “We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash.” Despite the announcement earlier this week, Adobe released Flash Player 11.1 for Android this morning. This will be the last major Flash Player release on the platform. Nonetheless, Adobe plans to continue releasing security updates and patches and they will continue to expand Flash for desktop. In fact, Flash Player 11 was recently released for desktop.

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Filed under: Product Engineering | Topics: adobe, apple, flash, html5