Adobe Gives Up On Mobile Flash

Adobe has announced plans to give up developing its Flash platform for mobile devices.

Soon, smartphones and tablets running Android and BlackBerry mobiles will lose their support for Flash, and a result will no longer be able to access video, games or ads produced using Adobe's software.  In effect, they'll see what it's like to have an iPhone ...  Steve Jobs never wanted Flash anywhere near either the iPhone or the iPad because he felt the Flash player was too unstable and likely to leave users with frustrated crashes.

So why has Adobe finally given up?  It seems that the ongoing fragmentation of mobile systems, and the growing number of custom versions, especially with Android, has left it with too much work to do.  Essentially, providing a custom version the plug-in for every new platform was costing Adobe too much money.  But the news won't be welcomed by those manufacturers, however, who enthusiastically supported Flash and used it as an argument to favour their products in place of Apple's.

Eventually, Flash will be entirely unsupported on every mobile platform, but it will remain available on Android handsets and the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook tablet for the time bheing.  These plug-ins will still get essential updgrades until a wider system update takes Flash away.  After a time, the technology will be entirely obsolete on mobiles, smartphones and tablets.

App devleopers will have to turn to Adobe Air, while mobile content should migrate to the new HTML 5 standard that Apple has been supporting for several years now.

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