Adobe to give up on Flash for mobile browsers

Adobe has spent a great deal of time and energy making Flash work for mobiles but although Flash is relatively successful on tablets, Adobe is reportedly giving up on Flash for mobile browsers. At this point, its usefulness is relatively limited on handsets. It may work, but it’s slow and it is often used in last resort – apps being the first option.

Adobe is expected to continue providing support to existing Flash deployments in the short term, but in the long run, Apps and HTML is the way to go says sources close to Adobe. At this point, the complete extent of the damage to Flash is unknown, and Flash developers must be anxious to know if they should start looking at HTML5 and Javascript now.

This will undoubtedly be seen as a victory for Apple, which has had a philosophical issue with having Flash on iOS. Steve jobs called Adobe “lazy” and argued that flash was “full of bugs”. In the end, Flash can only be successful if it is ubiquitous, and in the mobile world, it’s not. It’s main added-value is supposed to be “write once and deploy everywhere”…

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Cellphones, Tablets
Tags: adobe, business, flash, mobile