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]
Virt Atomican
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 6:52 AMThis comment has been deemed inappropriate and has been deleted.
Chris
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:17 AMStrange, there are more Android devices and Symbian devices out there (not combined) that iOS yet you say it’s the most popular in the world.
Apple didn’t kill Flash, its time was up. This website and the fanboys give Apple more credit than is due.
olearymo
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:27 AM+1. Shades of Apple ‘dropping’ DRM… it was already happening. They just (cleverly) got in early.
Apple could already see that Flash was going to die eventually. They kind of basically said that. It’s not like they weren’t honest about it.
ozoneocean
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 7:04 AMOh gods, is this idiocy from the US site? Flash works pretty decently on mobile devices and is definitely 100% still relevant since flash is a key part of the web experience. You are REALLY playing make believe if you imagine that it is not.
Try looking at the best porn sites only using html5 for a start you fool.
What’s worse than a site full of crappy flash ads? A badly coded, castrated mobile site of course. And unfortunately that includes almost all of them.
Who killed mobile flash? Not dead Jobs, no, it was the panicy, silly sheep on the Adobe board, that’s who.
olearymo
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:30 AMwe, uh… we’re calling him ‘Dead Jobs’ now are we?
Jason
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 7:23 AMI might have been brainwashed by using ios devices for several years but the idea of running a flash plugin on my iOS browser seem so archaic and retro. I haven’t used flash on mobile ever and have never missed it.
Johnny P
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 7:33 AMLet me point out a few issues with iOS devices. Go on your youtube app and type in any popular song, say party rock anthem by LMFAO. Guess what the main music clip doesn’t come up. Try any other popular song and you’ll see a pattern emerging. Perform the same action on an android device and it comes up right at the top of the list. That’s the work of a company not giving a shit about user experience and blocking any source of entertainment other than iTunes
Jason
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 7:42 AMIf I search from google. It pops up first. If I search from YouTube website, it doesn’t come up, if I search from YouTube app, I get same results as YouTube website. Are you saying apple are modifying the YouTube search results on the fly on my iOS device?
Adam
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 8:21 AMThe problem with ios getting rid of flash is that pretty much the entire internet uses flash, there are many websites you will not be able to access, simply because you have no flash.
My friends who have ios are often annoyed when I tell them then they cant access a site, because they need flash.
The Gremlin
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 8:59 AMThat is the point. Those sites will need to move to HTML5 or die over time. I say its a good thing
Simon
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 10:24 AM+1
Getting people to update their web browsers has always been harder than getting people to update to the latest version of flash. Hopefully this will reduce use of some archaic browsers out there.
Dr Doom
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 1:53 PMI think you might find apple did care about user experience and that’s why the canned flash for iPhone. Adobe where unable to demonstrate a mobile version of flash that wasn’t hardware intensive and didn’t cause slow down on their system.
Japius
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 7:50 AMJust searched that exact term on my iPhone and i get lots of results. I’m not familiar wit that particular band but I have watched 2 different film clips with what sounds like the correct song. I’m not sure you are correct.
Brett
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 8:01 AMFlash capable phones ie Android sales are increasing with almost vertical tend graphs? Adobe should have more faith in the market and Apple should be wary. Open source is the future on phones and desktops no matter how much money and patient law suits both Apple and Microsoft throw at the open source market.
David S.
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:16 AMOpen source is clearly not the future on desktops, after twenty years of promises it still sits at less than 2% of desktop installations. No one outside of the IT industry even knows what Linux is let alone thinks of it as an alternative for their laptop of desktop computer. Anyone who thinks it’s ever going to challenge Mac OS or Windows in the mainstream is dreaming. There comes a time when the promises have to be fulfilled and with Linux that’s always about five years from now.
Google is having more luck with it’s ‘sorta open, sorta free’ phone OS, but only because it eschews many of the very things all the FSF and open source advocates claim makes them so much better. Google’s relatively tight control over Android is what has made it so successful (in terms of market penetration but not revenue). And Google’s control over Android is going to have to become more pronounced rather than less if Android is to avoid the usual downfall of free and open source platforms – death/irrelevance by the thousand cuts of fragmentation.
Yep there are lots of Android phone out there, but many of them don’t have Flash installed and those that do are often useless on Flash sites because Flash on Android is even worse than it is on the desktop and laptop. I gave up on Flash on my Android phones, they’re living proof that Jobs nailed it when it comes to Flash. Good riddance to bad rubbish, now lets get rid of Flash on the desktop as well!
MotorMouth
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:49 AMI’m with David S. – I first got interested in Linux in around 1998 and back then they were saying that all they needed to do was improve the installation process and it would take over the world. Well, they sorted that out for the most part – although I have never had it install perfectly first time, there is always something I have to tweak manually – but here we are in 2011 and it is still largely useless. The fact is that anyone with a brain chooses their applications, then finds an OS that supports them all properly. Firefox is the only application I use on a daily basis that runs on Linux, so it is of virtually no use to me whatsoever. Yes, GIMP is a good replacement for Photoshop but there is no decent structured art package to replace Xara, Blender is no replacement for 3DS Max, there are no motion graphics suites to speak of and none of the real time music sequencers are a patch on applications like Fruityloops (which is nowhere near the best of breed on Windoze). They have had 15 years to entice developers across but it just hasn’t happened. There is no reason to suspect that might magically change, is there?
olearymo
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:22 AMI wouldn’t say so much murder as assisted suicide. Euthanasia.
Joel
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 11:05 AMYep Flash would have died itself either way, but Apple certainly helped it along. The world moves on to HTML5, Flash will continue to die.
Riavan
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:32 AMI read this article on my mobile and it made me rage so much I had to go onto my PC to write this comment. Thank god I feel slightly better knowing that everyone else has noticed how silly this article is too.
Flash isn’t slow and painful, unless it’s badly made. Apple did not want flash on their ipad and iphone, because it essentially gives people all the apps and tv content for free which is already on the internet anyway. The selling of apps is very important to apple.
So effectively, apple did it, to rip you apple fanbois off. Steve jobs wrote some long message trying to say flash wasn’t used anymore (lol its like half the internet) and that html 5 (which i can live with) and JAVA (LOLOLOLOL) is the future. What a dewb, obvious cash cow is obvious.
BenDTU
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 11:34 AMYou were doing really well with that rant of yours until you got Java and Javascript confused.
MotorMouth
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 9:39 AMThere is no Flash for WinPhone 7, nor was there Flash for ZuneHD. Even Windoze 8 misses out so far, which makes me think maybe Adobe were always going to stop development and were just waiting for an excuse?
z3d
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 10:42 AMif the product was called apple flash and not adobe flash, there’d be dancing in the streets with the news that this proprietary, resource hungry, buggy and exploit ridden dinosaur is extinct.
the only people that lose out of this is the advertising agencies. android probably did as much damage to flash than apple. flash was killing the browser performance so much that it needed to be disabled. all the advertising wasn’t loading on any mobile devices which meant ad agencies, the biggest revenue stream for flash, had no exposure in the mobile space so customers and agencies are demanding a html5 toolset.
Ash
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 10:51 AMJust for this, I will never buy an Apple iPhone. NEVER.
Rooboy
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 11:30 AMGood, more for the rest of us! :-D
BenDTU
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 11:32 AMI’m surprised people are taking this news so badly.
‘Flash’ as we know it will live on as AIR apps, so where’s the loss here exactly?
Wok
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 1:34 PMIt was always going to happen. Flash Player as we know it will become irrellevent on mobile devices but AIR and Flash Player on the desktop will still be providing functionality HTML 5 cant. I wont be supprised to see Flash/Flash Builder outputting HTML 5 either.
Just This Guy ...
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 2:26 PMThank all things high and mighty that Flash is finally getting the @rse.
It’s bee the worst thing to hit web design since the blink tag.
Personally, I despise all things Adobe almost as much as I despise all things Apple Corporate, so this all seems kinda ironic to me.
mark b
Monday, November 14, 2011 at 3:46 PMi’m glad flash is dead.. i never liked it anyways.