ZDNet reports that Adobe will no longer develop Flash plugins for mobile browsers. This finally puts to rest the horribly boring debate about Flash’s place in the new mobile world. Here’s Adobe’s announcement.
Apple struck the first major blow in this war by refusing to even consider Flash support in iOS from the very beginning. After many delays, Adobe did finally release Flash plugins for Android and other platforms, but as HTML 5 and other modern techniques have become commonplace, the need for such a resource-intensive system was just not there (nor was the performance or efficiency, by many accounts).
One of my favorite things about Apple is their willingness to summarily jettison technologies they think should be replaced, whether replacements have been widely adopted yet or not. They’ve done this to the disk drive, the modem, they’re working on doing it to the CD/DVD-ROM, etc. You may not always agree with the decisions, and there are certainly short-term tradeoffs that can be frustrating, but technology advances very slowly when companies are unwilling to part with obsolete features just because their users are comfortable with them.
Anyway, now we can all move on.
Apple didn’t refuse to support Flash because it was unaesthetic, and should be replaced; they refused to support Flash because people weren’t going to spend $1.99 on a video game in the App store if they could get the same game running in their web browser in Flash.
That’s part of a reason, but by far not the biggest. Think of all those flash games and flash content that exist already. Mouse rollover and mouse detection with flash is such a big part of flash navigation, it would have been an absolute nightmare to try to use a lot of these things on mobile devices, even assuming you managed to download that 3mb flash restaurant menu on your phone.
Warren@1 and Anthony: apple didn’t “refuse to consider” Flash on the first iPhone. Flash for mobile devices did not exist, full-stop, in 2007.
Arguably, Flash for Mobile never existed. Starting in 2009, Adobe released a bunch of universally loathed alpha test versions that could be downloaded in the Android Market and were bundled with a small number of devices by companies that had a serious contempt for their customers. A working version of Flash on a mobile platform never shipped at any time on any device.
You may or may not feel inclined to take him at his word, but Steve Jobs claimed on the record that Apple had requested demos of Flash on mobile multiple times from Adobe over several years, and were never shown a working product.
I’m sure the decision had nothing whatsoever to do with Apple’s NIH syndrome. St. Stephen of Cupertino knows best, y’all–you’re just his customers.
Face it, Adobe Flash is dead.
Just as I correctly predicted.
HTML 6 is the winner.
maddogm13@4: yes, you’ve got it entirely. This was all about Apple’s NIH syndrome. Which is why they developed their own multimedia plugin for iOS devices instead.
Oh wait, no, that’s the exact opposite of what they did.
anon@2 gets the other part of the equation. Even assuming that Adobe had managed to deliver a Flash runtime that wasn’t a crashy, battery-eating pile of poo, Flash would still have been a miserable experience on mobile devices. (But it’s a moot point, since at no time was such a product delivered.)
A few points…
Flash technology, as a whole, isn’t dead for mobile, they’re just backing out of the Flash Plugin in mobile browsers. Developers who make content for Flash can still put it on iPhones, Android, Blackberry tablets &etc. with AIR apps. The top-selling iPad game game of September was built this way:
http://thenextweb.com/?p=122755
As for Flash being dead (this is in part to @6), there’s still lots of places where it’ll be around and thrive. Can you do this in your browser with HTML5?
http://youtu.be/CeYCsBIK3uE
Or this?
http://rhizopods.com/
WebGL is going in that direction, but by the time all the standards line up, and the browser vendors implement them (not to mention incompatibilities, like in the early days of CSS)… there’s still a large place for Flash, though mostly on the Desktop.
(to be absolutely clear though, HTML5 + JS is almost always the better choice. Just not always :-p)
@8:
“As for Flash being dead (this is in part to @6), there’s still lots of places where it’ll be around and thrive.”
Well yes. For starters, I expect that well into 2025, 90% of all shitty restaurant websites will still be using Flash. 🙁
@4, Flash was/is kludgy software that hogged processor and battery power, which seriously affected the user experience.
Moreover, though Apple was an early investor in Adobe and the two companies were the original twin pillars of the desktop-publishing revolution, Adobe initially refused to rewrite much of its software for OSX, though Macs were heavily used in video-production, advertising, and publication houses. The silver lining there was that Apple began concentrating on writing capable apps in-house for these uses that worked well together and reduced Apple’s vulnerability to the whims and misjudgments of other companies. They didn’t get where they are by being patsies.
@8 is 100% correct. Flash is lousy for web design but fantastic for fun little apps and games and demonstration projects. I am no gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but I play a few minutes of five or six flash games a week just for fun.
@9 is sadly also correct. And the menus will be in giant PDFs (presumably in the 100-GB range by 2025). Few things are as frustrating as using your phone’s much-vaunted “where can I get something to eat around here” feature only to encounter a page that deliberately hides every bit of pertinent information so you can see the feathery fronds of some typographic curlicue wave instead.
Apple refused to adopt flash, because it was a 100% work-a-round way of avoiding their app store. Why pay 99 cents for a flash game, when you can point the browser to a web site.
Sure HTML5 is nice, but its years away from being fully adopted. Youtube has many examples of HTML5 on an iPhone or iPAd, but they dont look nothing like the comericals. Its ugly, clunky and a tad buggy.
What, am I talking to myself here?
Folks, this isn’t a matter for debate, it’s the damn historical record. Adobe never shipped a fully functional (or even close) version of Mobile Flash. You can debate all you want about Apple’s tyrannical approach to their app store, but it’s insane to ding them for not “supporting” a product that didn’t exist at all when the iPhone first shipped, and only began to approach beta-test quality in the last 9 months.
@12 Actually, the App Store didn’t exist until almost a year and a half after the iPhone was first announced (and about a year after it went on sale). Apple initially said that users didn’t need to install applications at all, and that web apps were fine for things not supported by the software supplied with the phone. People started hacking the iPhone and building apps anyway, and it was only after that that Apple reversed course. (And they’ve probably never been so happy about changing their minds).
Now, Apple is certainly very happy to be getting the revenue from the App store, in place of people playing flash games, but Apple’s dislike of Flash predates their love of that 30% revenue cut.