Adobe Flash Partly Blames Apple for Mobile Platform Failure

Posted by unlocker under News on Sunday Dec 4, 2011

Adobe Flash explained the reasons for stopping the development of Flash for the mobile platform and partially blames Apple for the decision.
Adobe recently announced pulling the stops for the development of Flash player in mobile browsers. Thus, it created a fuss and a lot of opinions about the future of web. While a lot of people were optimistic on the developments of HTML 5, Flash users are obviously unhappy with the decision.
Product manager of Adobe Flash Mike Chambers wrote a blog post outlining the major reasons why the company did not pursue Flash web platform. He said that Adobe Flash will not be ubiquitous in mobile web. According to Chambers personal blog, “This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.”
Also, it was very clear in Steve Jobs letter entitled “Thoughts On Flash” that the software will not be available in Apple iOS in the foreseeable future. According to Apple, one of the primary issues of Adobe Flash is its underperformance in mobile web browsers and the strong emergence of HTML 5 technologies.
Due to the fact that there are over 200 million iOS devices, a lot of publishers are publishing content supported by HTML 5 technologies and reducing their dependence on Flash. Adobe even offered to publish content using tools playable in iOS.
A lot of smartphone browsers are built on WebKit and HTML 5 supports different platforms such as iOS, Android and BlackBerry. According to the post of Chambers, “HTML5 has very strong support on modern mobile devices and tablets. Indeed, on mobile devices, it has a level of ubiquity similar to what the Flash Player has on the desktop. While performance and implementations haven’t always been great or consistent across devices, they have continued to improve at a pretty dramatic rate (just look at the insane Canvas performance increases between iOS 4 and 5)… Our goal has always been to obtain the same level of ubiquity for the Flash Player on mobile browsers, but, at the end of the day, it is something that did not, and was not going to happen.”
Since there are already other better ways to deliver videos on the web, Flash is slowly losing its ground in the market that it previously dominated. Although HTML 5 does not high end features like DRM protection, publishers are looking for platforms that can widely disseminate their content.
Another strong offering of Flash is in the game scene. However, mobile developers chose to go native, as evident from the large number of applications on both the App Store and the Android Market. Moreover, Adobe themselves provided a cross compiler, which allowed developers to package their Flash applications as native apps.

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