Adobe blames Apple for the death of Flash Player for mobile

Earlier this week, Adobe announced that it would be killing off Flash for mobile browsers, but it didn’t give a reason to why it was doing so. And for those of you who are curious, Mike Chambers, the Principal Product manager for the Flash Platform at Adobe has finally spoken up, confirming pretty much what we’ve suspected all along. The death of Flash Player for mobile browsers was mainly because of Apple’s refusal to adopt the player in iOS. Chambers wrote on his 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… Just to be very clear on this. No matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to be available on Apple’s iOS anytime in the foreseeable future.

With everyone deciding to support HTML5 instead of Flash on modern devices, its popularity for usage in mobile devices pretty much went downhill. I guess it looks like Android owners have one “advantage” less over iOS. While Flash will still work on those platforms that already support it, don’t expect the experience to get any better.

George Wong
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: adobe, adobe flash, Apple Inc, flash, iOS