News Flash

For months, colleagues, clients and I, as well as the market in general, have argued about the future of Adobe’s Flash environment. Many of my clients have been highly resistant to the adoption of iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad, mostly because they didn’t accommodate Flash. Apple’s contention was that Flash was both a processor and memory hog, and that it’s vulnerabilities to hacking made it too unreliable for mobile browsers, and that the emerging specifications within HTML5 would provide an effective replacement for it.

Well, this week Adobe quietly killed further development of Flash for mobile browsers.

In my opinion, in doing so they have killed Flash. Period. It may take a while to breathe its last, but it’s dead. And here’s why:

Flash is an incredibly capable platform – not just a movie player or video streaming system, but a complete coding system for many kinds of web-based interactivity. Because of that level of capability (i.e., the ability to run code on your local machine) it has not only been a capable system, but an exploitable one. Revelations about Flash vulnerabilities are in the industry news regularly.

But the real reason is this: why would anybody continue to develop in a desktop-browser-only environment when the fastest increasing use of the web is on mobile platforms? Sure, you can develop both mobile and desktop-bound versions of your website, but why incorporate an entire authoring platform, and the expertise required for it (which is considerable) when there are equivalent environments (or nearly so) that DO run on mobile browsers?

Flash will retain its devotees, but in my opinion the handwriting is on the wall, long term.

This environment will now begin to go “the way of all Flash”.

JRR