For everyone loving the ability to view Flash content on your Android smartphone/tablet or your BlackBerry PlayBook, Adobe is looking to pull the plug on that within the near future. As much of as a let down this may sound like, it really isn’t. As most of the content on the internet now supports HTML5, even Google and RIM began shifting its focus towards that web solution. Most of the internet content providers have shifted towards HTML5to support Apple’s mobile iOS browser anyways. Adobe had this to say on the matter:
However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.
In case you doubted them, Apple was ahead of its time by denying Flash support for its iOS devices in favor of HTML5 as the other companies are now following suit.
