This was inevitable, Flash for mobile browsers is coming to an end and Adobe will be focusing mobile efforts to HTML5. Some guy named Steve Jobs got lambasted for pretty muchpredicting this last year, looks like he was right. Here’s my favourite part:
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
For those of you who loved Flash on mobile don’t fret (you’ll still fret), Adobe will continue support for existing mobile Flash apps:
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.
Adobe’s announcement of the death of Flash on mobiles can be found on their official blog.
Still, my biggest question is what will happen to the Apple App Store when everything is HTML5 why make it an app? There are many good reasons, but I do wonder if the app store’s days of monopoly on iOS app distribution are numbered. Ugh, maybe I’ll put more thought into this another day.