Adobe Software has let slip that it plans to abandon its Flash Player for mobile web browsers. Instead, the company will refocus its mobile efforts on web standards like HTML5, along with tools like Adobe AIR, which allows developers to convert Flash content into native mobile applications.
The move comes as something of a surprise given how vigorously Adobe has defended mobile Flash in the past. Lately, however, Adobe has been proposing new web standards and even bought the non-Flash mobile development tool PhoneGap, both of which indicate that Adobe is looking toward a future without Flash.
Indeed, while Adobe’s plans affect only mobile Flash at the moment,
the sudden about-face does not bode well for Flash on the desktop.
Mobile devices are the fastest growing means of connecting to the web;
what doesn’t work on mobile devices will soon not be a relevant part of
the web at all.
In abandoning mobile, Adobe is effectively admitting that Flash has no future on the web.
That doesn’t mean Flash will disappear overnight. Nor does it mean
that Flash will ever disappear for developers interested in using it. It
just means that when it comes to deploying Flash applications, the web
won’t be a realistic option. Instead, Flash developers of the future
will convert their Flash code into Android, Windows Mobile or iOS apps
using Adobe AIR’s conversion tools.
Web developers, on the other hand, will likely abandon Flash if they
haven’t already. Without a reliable way to serve Flash content to mobile
devices, its web presence will likely continue to decline. Of course
the demise of Flash has been inevitable for some time — after all, much
of HTML5 was specifically designed to give developers a means of
replacing Flash dependencies with native tools — but Adobe’s decision to
abandon mobile devices should send a clear message to any developers
who haven’t yet read the writing on the wall: Mobile is the future of
the web and Flash isn’t part of it.
In the short term, Adobe is merely admitting what most developers
already know; there are only two ways to develop for mobile devices:
using the web and HTML5 or building platform native apps.
To choose web-based Flash apps over either of these options would
mean consciously limiting your app’s audience. Given that neither
Apple’s iOS nor Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 supports Flash (nor for that
matter will Microsoft’s Windows 8 Metro),
developing web apps that relied on Mobile Flash meant targeting only
Android and Blackberry users. Adobe’s decision to abandon Flash for
Mobile browsers is simply a pragmatic acceptance of the existing
development landscape.
Similarly, while we don’t expect it to happen overnight, eventually
Adobe will probably abandon Flash Player for the desktop as well — why
continue developing a product when very few are using it? The AIR
platform and its Flash-based tools for building native mobile apps will
still be around to sell the Flash development tools (which is, after
all, how Adobe makes money). Adobe simply won’t have any great need to
continue pushing Flash on the web.
While some web standards advocates might see the eventual demise of
Flash Player as a good thing for the web, we’re not so sure. Web
standards were created to ensure that sites and apps work no matter what
browser or device you’re using. Web standards were not created for —
and have not historically been very good at — driving innovation on the
web.
Innovation on the web has more often come from individual vendors —
browsers, device makers and, yes, Flash. Flash laid many of the
so-called cowpaths that HTML5 is paving in open standards. The audio and
video tags for embedding media, the canvas element for animation, and
the websockets protocol for communications are just a few of the things
Flash helped to popularize on the web. That’s not to suggest that a web
without Flash will want for innovation, but it certainly won’t be richer
for Flash’s absence when that day arrives.
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