HTML5 has become the new flavor for rich media development and with this new direction of Adobe combined with the growth of mobile devices to access the web, it would seem as if Flash may become a deprecated programming language eventually.
No doubt Apple will be glad Adobe, the owners of Flash technology, are no longer supporting development of the rich content platform for browsers on mobile devices.
The company announced:
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.
These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection. Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.
HTML5 has become the new flavor for rich media development and with this new direction of Adobe combined with the growth of mobile devices to access the web, it would seem as if Flash may become a deprecated programming language eventually.
Though if commenters of the Adobe announcement are any indication, some people are annoyed by this.
Michael Vitale, VP of Operations of TalkPoint Communications posted:
This is a poor decision by Adobe. Despite all the negative press about Flash on mobile devices most content distributors are very content to deliver live audio and video in Flash. In most cases we only fall back on html 5 to support iOS devices using HLS streaming. The current functionality of html 5 is simply not on par with Actionscript.
This announcement is going to scare content creators and force distributors to look for alternatives to Flash streaming. With such a dominant footprint on PCís and Android devices why would you quit to become just another provider of app creation software?
Sites like Techcrunch and CNN are already picking up this post and raking Adobe over the coals. Stop letting Apple back the bus up over you and fight back. Do not stop developing Flash for mobile devices!
Image credit: shirt.woot!