Adobe abandons mobile Flash development

Thought this was important news today:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/09/tech/mobi ... index.html



As HTML 5 is becoming more commonplace and with all the new features that come with it I can also see why Flash will be obsolete one day. You can create many Flash like effects with many of the new features in the latest browsers that do not require any plugins such as Adobe Flash. For me personally I also have been avoiding using any Flash based objects on my web pages as I can often achieve the same result using a standard that all browsers support.



Awhile back you may remember I had post about when Adobe CS5 was released. One of the features that I was interested in at the time was being able to create apps for the iPhone from Adobe Flash which would be exported in the .ipa format. Apple did not like this, they changed their terms in the software development kit, and that effectively blocked Adobe's moves. Soon after Flash development for the iPhone was abandoned by Adobe.

We have also talked about if HTML5 will replace Flash before.

Flash will not work on my iPhone. It really irritated me when it didn't. I wasn't sure whether to be upset with Apple or Adobe.

The blame is completely on Apple ATNO my friend, flash does work on the iPhone its just the mobile safari version is intentionally prevented from loading it. There's a simple little hack you can use remove that handy-cap and use flash on the iPhone.

I believe the main reason Adobe has stopped developing flash for mobile browsers is because mobile browsers themselves are pretty much obsolete now that tablets and even my HTC has all the processing power of an average desktop from 5yrs ago.

Despite all the hate from Jobs, who in the end was acting out of self interest, flash is an open format with a lot of strengths. The jQuery crowd that get so excited about a slide and a fade really frustrate me when they call that the end of flash when that's what flash was doing 15yrs ago and jQuery is just the followers

Basically the majority of the Apple and CSS crowd are followers and perhaps they're frustrated that their leader is too complex for them to understand, flash has had an enormous impact on progressing the consumer experience within the internet... always the very most impressive websites are built in flash, and still even with the handy capped iPhone so popular, 98% + of visitors to my sites have flash installed.

Ok CSS and HTML5 lovers, you get to slide and fade and refresh the page a bit more fluidly now... congrats it took you long enough, and meanwhile flash has been developed into a fully capable 3d engine... god luck catching up with that.

It sounds like Adobe is re-focusing their game plan. Nothing really to worry about in that article. The author got a line and conjectured the rest of the article. Adobe is focusing on AIR which as many mobile device users have noticed they have to download/update their AIR plugin in order to use many apps. For the mobile market adobe is just cutting their resources who were trying to build a stable release for crappy hardware and browsers. Mobile browsers are for looking up the nearest McDonalds or looking up an actor name on IMDb or searching for an answer on wiki. Most actions performed on a mobile browser...well... there's an app for that. Enter Adobe AIR. Why continue with a mobile flash plugin? Wait for the hardware and browser to catchup when mobile devices can use a full browser. I hate using the browser on a mobile device anyway. I get complaints that even certain CSS and Javascript doesn't work correctly on mobile browsers. Flash is not the only thing that can't display correctly on a mobile broswer. Heck, the current major browsers still can't figure out how to display HTML/CSS/JS the same or even agree on the same name for event handlers. As for the new technologies, it's going to be interesting to see how much coding it will take to mimic some advanced flash tasks. I guess I'll have to include 100 JS plugins and style sheets. Flash has always been a simpler, cleaner platform. The code can be arranged by keyframes and the .fla is compressed to a single usable file that's easy to send over the wire. If the plugin is installed all users see the same thing and it works the same. That's worth it. Flash is going later rather than sooner. Real browsing is done on a real computer anyways.

Agree agree.
I don't use any scripts on my web because I don't understand it [should I learn it someday eventually?]. That's why flash helps me very much and it's more simpler with only one file.

I just installed flexbuilder4.6 . Adobe claims that you can export to android and iphone. It seems in contradiction with stopping the mobile for flash. Can anyone explain this?

I understand that Adobe is stopping a mobile browser flash plugin. Flexbuilder should be able to be used for building mobile AIR apps using the FLEX framwork.