November 9th, 2011 
Marvin Blase Today Adobe has published a pressrelease in which they announce to stop the development for Flash in mobile browsers. And again, these discussions start all over again. Was Steve Jobs right? Will Flash now completely die? Has HTML5 finally won?
For me, Adobe‘s decision is completely right. Because: What was the benefit of Flash being displayed in mobile browsers? Every Flash in the WWW was optimized for mouse input and desktop performance. Only a few Flash developers on earth did change their Flash movies or – which is standard for HTML elements already – provide a mobile version of it. Personally, I’ve never seen any embedded Flash which was optimized for my mobile browser – they’re most likely simply scaled down and in most cases ran poorly. Besides I feel like half of them are ads and 30% are animations no one needs. Complex web apps still needed a lot of optimization for mobile devices. And if you’re going for that way, why not do it right and use the benefits of Adobe AIR and it’s mobile packagers?
Lee Brimelow has just posted his thoughts on that as well – Flash to Focus on Apps for Mobile:
The decision reflects the reality that the kind of highly-interactive content people build with Flash, games being a great example, are much-better suited to run as mobile apps. Also there is the fact that Flash is not nearly as ubiquitous on mobile browsers as it is on the desktop.
At the end of the day I’ve deinstalled the mobile Flash plugin on my Android as I simply didn’t need it and all the unnessesary flash movies were causing extra traffic and performance. If the site does not provide any good fallback variants for no-flash devices, what’s the point of being barrier-free these days? If you want to deliver your browser-content to a broad variety of devices – seriously, would you ever have gone for Flash to block out all iOS devices?
And here comes Steve Jobs into play. With his “We will not allow Flash to be displayed in our browsers” he set the course for every webdeveloper to think of good fallback variants, as iPads probably will display the rest of the page all fine. This decision might have been a weird one some months ago but now leads to a seamless transition into non-mobile Flash Players as most pages already have these alternative contents which work everywhere. And – this – is – fine! Thank you, Steve.
However, I’m a Flash Dev 24/7 and I do love it. For me, Flash remains being an outstanding platform and this “loss” is more a win, as Adobe now can investigate in Adobe AIR and their HTML5 dev without fighting all these mobile browser discussions. And if we’re taking a glance at the future, we can all be happy with that. Adobe AIR is becoming more and more awesome and I love every single project in which we’re able to use it.
When it comes down to a complex webapp: I use Flash. When the client then wants to use this app on his iOS device or Android: I use Adobe AIR. If a client wants a game, multi platform e.g.: I use Adobe AIR. Of course it will never (most likely) compete with native applications but there are a lots of situations where it simply makes sense to use Adobe AIR. And in addition with Native Extensions the remaining no-go-situations will decrease as well.
To sum it: Flash Mobile died. So what? I totally agree with Grant Skinner, saying:
If this decision allows Adobe to focus on increasing innovation in the desktop player, significantly improving their app packagers, and investing heavily in HTML5 tooling, it’s got my vote.
Besides I’m really looking forward to some awesome performance boosts with Stage3D. If this is how a dying platform looks like, I’d love to follow it straight to hell:
- Adobe MAX: Unreal Engine 3 a Flash Player 11
- Console Quality 2D and 3D Games with Stage 3D Hardware Acceleration
Have a nice day and don’t get lost in too many discussions.
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You said it, I fully agree.
not sure if that is a smart move though i agree that ok developers do scale down for smartphones … and seeing the resolutions of smartphones i agree that scaled down version makes swf sluggish, I can’t agree for that with tablets and tablets are getting better and better next year Kal-El processors will come out and tablets have enough resolution to be developed for specifically.
I find it funny that it was one of the major selling points of Android, and now it’s being dumped..
I think it’s a little sad, we definitely went through a couple of our sites and updated them for touch when the player became available. The player is definitely used a lot by me, just to sites that don’t work otherwise..
But I understand the position Adobe are in, I think it’s a smart decision. They couldn’t possibly hope to implement the player in all the mobile platforms that we are seeing, and if I had to choose I would definitely take AIR over the mobile player.
“Adobe now can concentrate on Adobe AIR and their HTML5 dev without fighting will all these mobile browser discussions”
you’d hope so, but resources might not directly be pumped into AIR navtive apps and HTML5…
“The decision comes as Adobe plans to cut 750 staff, principally in North America and Europe.” – http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/nov/09/adobe-flash-mobile-dead?cat=technology&type=article
@Philipp:
True, I’m not saying that they have a shift of development resources. Considering this cut it still means, that they can concentrate on (personally for me) more important stuff and abandon this niche product which caused so many trouble and discussion from all sides.
I agree with you, Marvin. I have uninstalled the Flash Player on my mobile as well as I do not like most of the ways it was used by Web Developers. As you’ve mentioned, many Flash movies are just scaled down and do not provide any special functionality.
If you want to keep working with Flash and mobiles, make use of Adobe AIR apps. They have become really powerful with version 3.0 and do not really lack any major OS performance/ability.
I also think that Air is more important than Flash in the mobile browser at present. It would have been nice to have both but it is possible to live without Flash content on websites. The only thing I really miss on Safari on my iPad are the videos on the BBC website.
I wonder if renewed support from Adobe for the mobile flash browser plugin is a possibility down the line? Is the drop in support an acknowledgement that the mobile browser just isn’t ready to rival anything that can be done natively?
I do think that announcing that support is being dropped for Flash in the mobile browser is sending out an uneasy message – this is being picked up as ‘Flash support is being dropped for mobile’ and there are many companies out there that simply don’t know that Flash can be used to create an iOS App.
I really hope that Adobe gets their marketing right for this.
A phone or tablet could have just switched Flash to “on-demand” rather than having to uninstall it. Touch events were still registered as mouse clicks and a lot of content that was not refined for mobile would still work just fine. On my Android tablet, there’s a number of tv shows that streamed Flash video content just great from the networks and aren’t available on my iPad unless I paid for a specific data plan or buy them from iTunes.
My thoughts as a developer aside, I want devices with mobile Flash Player on as a user. That’s a HUGE selling point for me. For development purposes I have both and Android tablet and iPad and when browsing web content I will always pick up my Android tablet over my iPad.
I agree completely, I think this is great news. Personally I’m saddened (and more than a little frustrated) to see the beginnings of a new avalanche of “Flash is dead” hyperbole on the internet, because most of that stuff is grossly misinformed, and usually misses the point entirely.
I’ve always thought that putting Flash in the mobile browser was unnecessary, and that cross-compiling to AIR held the true promise of Flash on mobile. I’m glad to see that Adobe is realizing this and moving their resources in the right direction.
With Flash 11 coming out for the desktop with Stage3D and hardware acceleration, it’s an exciting time for Flash.
@Matthew:
You’re right, but: Why don’t they dump their Flash streams into an AIR app? They could easily do so without any major code difference and even make it way more userfriendly. Including some functionality that the Flash in browser cannot supply such as offline caching, saving a lot(!) of your energy/cpu due to StageVideo and stuff. I understand the flash movies did work, but Adobe never spent too much time about optimizing energy drains and stability. So I can resign 9/10 browser-flashs if only two or three of them are getting deployed to an app (because this means that they have content only accessible/usable via Flash and they do care about you, as user)
In addition – and here comes everything into play – you could use this app on your iPad as well – no need to charge money for it. So, why bother at all? I’m still happy with Adobe’s decision as it means that maybe some Flash content from the web will be translated into an app and becomes available for me as iPad user as well.
@Fintan:
Yep, Adobe had a really hard time today due to their misleading communication, I think. However, I’m a bit tired of this hyperbole about Flash dying or not – to me it’s like Flash is organic, it had great times some years ago but now has to start where HTML ends (and this has become a clearly high-performance niche) but with Adobe AIR it’s even stepping far ahead in terms of mobile development.
Completely agree!
Was writing almost the same today:
But is it really game changing announcement?
Definitely not!
In fact, nothing has changed, because until now there was no single significant Flash project targeting mobile browsers.
http://skovalyov.blogspot.com/2011/11/according-to-rumors-which-are-likely-to.html
Hopefully these 750 employees were not fired directly because of this subject. This would definetly set Adobe in a bad spot… But you have written a very good summary, I totally agree with it.
[...] Steve Jobs sehen, der ja in seinen letzten Jahren Flash auf Apples iPhone und iPad ablehnte, nehmen andere diese Mitteilung erheblich gelassener. Denn Adobe unterstützt mit seinen Entwicklungswerkzeugen [...]
For whatever reasons they have done it: I also do agree with Grant – if that means we will get a better mobile packager and desktop Flash, I am all fine with it!!
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