Adobe has announced that, as the late Apple CEO predicted, the Flash era is coming to an end.
ZDNet reports that Adobe is stopping development on Flash Player for browsers on mobiledevices. Instead, the company will be focusing on putting together tools enabling developers to package Adobe AIR apps for “all the major app stores” as well as looking more closely at HTML5 solutions.
Mobile Flash has always been a point of contention between iOS and Android fanboys, with the latter believing that their devices’ Flash compatibility makes them better and more flexible. However, with the popularity of iOS — particularly the iPad — many content providers are increasingly providing their material in iOS-friendly HTML5 format rather than the proprietary Flash platform. Why lock out your content from an increasingly large set of mobile and tablet users, after all?
In April of last year, the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs penned an extensive post regarding his thoughts on Flash. The gist of his argument was that Flash was “100% proprietary,” making it a closed system. Jobs admitted that iOS itself was also a proprietary, closed system, but said that as far as web standards went, it firmly supported the use of open standards such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. He also commented that Flash’s performance on mobile devices was questionable at best, and that the additional demands placed on a device’s processor to decode Flash video in software drained battery at almost twice the rate of the hardware-decoded H.264 standard.
What Jobs called the “most important reason,” however, was that “letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.” Reliance on third party tools, Jobs argued, meant that developers couldn’t take full advantage of the hardware they had, and instead were at the mercy of said third party keeping those tools appropriately updated — and that a cross-platform solution such as Flash had to take a “lowest common denominator” approach to its feature set.
The announcement that Adobe would be cutting Flash support for mobile devices comes in the wake of news that 750 jobs would be lost at the company following a period of “corporate restructuring.