Flash mobile is no more

Adobe is to announce controversially that they will be ceasing flash development on mobile devices going forward.

In a leaked briefing to its partners, Adobe has sensationally said that there will be no future development on its flagship product for mobile devices and will instead focus on HTML5 and creating tools to make mobile applications.
It will also continue to develop for the desktop both in and out of browser.

Apple win? I think not!

Adobe throwing in the towel on mobile is going to be seen as a victory for Apple who famously shunned the platform from its devices.  In fact Steve Jobs famously recommended them to do such a think last year in his “thoughts on Flash” post where he said:

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

In actuality, I think this illustrates a clear pattern that any platform that fails to find its killer application, is destined to fail. At the moment there are no real games or apps which are based on mobile flash which have caught the imagination of the public at large.

Even on the Android handsets that support flash, the implementation can be fiddly with only part of the flash image visible. The key success factor that adobe failed to grasp is that any mobile product needs to be designed for mobile from the ground up, instead of porting a desktop product and trying to make it fit.

Ironically Flash’s multimedia capabilities and performance  far outstrips that of any other competing technologies, in fact its because of this that its gaining great traction in the gambling, advertising, live broadcast and TV markets, where it has reduced the cost of production significantly.

Not a lot of people will mourn the loss of flash on mobile, however there is a clear gap in the market for a mobile solution that is quick to develop and will give  great video overlays and 3d performance.

For those users on Android phones like Sony Ericsson and playbooks with flash, Adobe will make sure that there are security update and critical bug fixes to existing releases.

Well done to ZDNET blog for picking up the info

By Grant Kemp, Head of Delivery, We Love Mobile Ltd

This is a repost of an article I wrote  on my blog androidbloke.co.uk posted last week, which I hope will be of interest to WLM readers.