This isn’t all that much of a shock, but it does confirm what we already suspected. Adobe says iOS rejection killed Flash.
Flash engineer Mike Chambers took to his blog to provide an extremely thorough autopsy of mobile Flash, and ultimately, blame for its undoing:
Given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.
Let me make that more succinct: Apple rejected mobile Flash, mobile Flash died. Adobe recognised that, among other reasons it couldn’t proceed with the back of the tech world’s darling turned to it. “The Flash Player was not going to achieve the same ubiquity on mobile as it has on the desktop,” Chambers explains politely, much in the same way that HD DVDs and jetpacks never quite reached ubiquity. So Adobe did the smart thing — it embraced HTML5 and will switch the focus of Flash to browser gaming and beautiful streaming video.
And so the world goes on. For the rest of us, this should, we hope, mean some smoother internet time. For RIM, it means playing dress up acid trip make believe. And for Apple, more affirmation of the obvious: it usually gets what it wants. [Mike Chambers via PC Mag]