The demise of Adobe Flash for mobile devices came as a surprise and reeling flash developers and mobile device vendors alike(source). Flash enjoyed almost unchallenged supremacy as multimedia platform since its macromedia days up until Apple’s iPhone came to life. Still now majority rich media application & Games on the web circumnavigate around Flash. Flash Player for smart phones was made available to handset manufacturers at the end of 2009 in order to achieve mobile platform dominance just as web. But unfortunately the rein of Flash is about to come to an end. Things started to fall apart for Adobe Flash, when Steve Jobs famously posted a note on Apple’s website calling Flash closed, unstable, and antiquated. Accusing Adobe of living in the past and not innovating to keep up with the mobile Web, he reason why Adobe Flash won’t be supported by iPhone & iPad.
Nonetheless Adobe kept investing on Flash and managed to get Apple’s Mobile & Tablet market competitors as partners who are willing to support Flash on their device in order to get an edge over Apple. So things aren’t that bad for Flash, right? Support for all vendor’s mobile device minus one, even though Apple’s device dominate the market. But the future of Flash on Mobile device gets more complicated with the evolution of “HTML5”.
The fifth generation of the HTML code that creates the Web is a leap forward, and it’s poised to jump-start the next wave of Web innovation online, offline and on the move. HLML5 allows Internet browsers to deliver game-like interactivity without installing additional software. HTML5 can easily allow audio and video playback without any plug-ins at all. We all so often ran into a message saying that we needed this plug-in or that plug-in to play this video or audio file. And now thanks to HTML5 we can finally get those memories left behind. Another remarkable feature brought by HTML5 is Canvas which is a new JavaScript graphics library that brings a lot a host of animation effects that previously were only available via Adobe’s Flash. In the past, new devices meant new browsers & new delivery method which meant a real headache for developers. With HTML5 developers can literally “Develop once. Run anywhere”. No need to port for new device, no more compatibility nightmare.
Rivals such as Apple Inc., Google Inc., and Microsoft Corp. who more often disagree about supremacy of their chosen technology at least started to agree on one thing that is “HTML5”. Though apart from Apple everybody still accommodate Flash but they started to shift their attention on HTML5. Some 34% of the 100 most popular websites used HTML5 in the quarter ended in September, according to binvisions.com, a blog that tracks Web technologies.
Even after Adobe furiously rejected Job’s criticism that Flash is backdated technology, even they started to add support for HTMl5 into their programming tools.
Technology evolve, change so frequently that producer, vendors & developers alike has to evolve around it. Flash isn’t dead just yet but a part of it, which you can say half of it the Mobile Flash is dead. The market experts are presenting different reasoning for “the why“, you can find hundreds of them across the web ever since Adobe’s announcement. But the bottom-line is very simple the major reason why Flash for mobile device has to take a bow:
- Denied entry on iOS devices. The iPhone accounts for more than 60% of global smartphone web traffic and the iPod touch makes up more than 95% of “mobile Internet device” traffic.
- Evolution of HTML5 which makes things so easy both for developers and Users and Flash couldn’t answer the challenge pose by HTML5
- Unable to address accessibility concern arise by Flash contents
- Rocky track record with security. Adobe Flash is known to prawn to vulnerability and security holes. Many major security experts recommend to either not install Flash or to block it.
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