Adobe Drops Flash for Mobile Devices
Thursday, November 10th, 2011Up in iHeaven, Steve Jobs must be chuckling. Adobe announced Wednesday that it will end development and support for mobile Flash, in favor of HTML5 technologies.
In an announcement on its Adobe Blogs, Interactive Development Vice President and General Manager Danny Winokur wrote that his company “will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work on new mobile device configurations,” after the coming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android devices and BlackBerry’s PlayBook tablet.
HTML5 ‘The Best Solution’
Instead, he said, “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.” Winokur added that the company will continue to support existing device configurations with bug fixes and security updates, and that current licensees can continue developing and releasing their own Flash products.
In his statement, Winokur noted that HTML5 is now supported on all major mobile devices, “in some cases exclusively” — a reference to Apple’s devices, where Apple CEO and co-founder Jobs decreed that HTML5 was superior to Flash. HTML5, he added, is “the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across multiple platforms.”
The company is continuing to invest in Flash development for Macs and PCs, and in the next Flash Player. It is not yet clear if Adobe’s dropping mobile Flash is related to its recent decision to lay off 750 employees.
In April 2010, Jobs posted a note on the Apple Web site titled “Thoughts on Flash.” He noted that Apple and Adobe go way back, to their garage origins, and that Adobe’s PostScript was adopted for Apple’s Laserwriter printer, making the computer company Adobe’s first big customer.
Jobs: Create ‘Great HTML5 Tools’
In explaining why he did not want to allow Flash to be fully…
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