Earlier this month Adobe announced in an email to developers that it was ending Flash Mobile. Kevin Lynch, Adobe CTO, explained the strategy as follows:
We believe that HTML5 is a significant catalyst for growth for Adobe. And it’s a multi-year vector of innovation for most of our products. HTML5 is great for Adobe and great for the industry.
The key phrase I just used, and I people to make sure we all recognize this, is that most of our products – absolutely HTML5 is going to result in the substrate of the web undergoing a major overhaul – but it’s much bigger than just web pages. It’s the foundation of how content is going to be delivered in the years ahead.
Web, video, publishing, gaming are all going to increasingly rely on HTML5 across PCs, phones, TVs, and tablets. That is the foundation that we’re building toward and that’s the foundation we’re going to take a leadership position in.
A couple of days later Flash developer Mike Chambers expanded on the reasons for ending Flash Mobile and the future of Flash in general. He noted that:
Finally, given the growth of HTML5 on both mobile and desktop browsers, we decided to more evenly balance our resources dedicate between Flash and HTML5.
Halting development on the Flash Player for mobile devices frees up resources for HTML5 development (tooling, frameworks, browsers).
So the future at Adobe calls for less Flash and more HTML5. 
Contemplating Adobe’s increasing investment in HTML5 development tools and at the same time terminating Flash for mobile devices and what it means regarding Flash overall brings to mind the following quote from Winston Churchill; “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Can it be that in a few months or a couple of years that as Flash Mobile went, so will Flash? To learn more regarding the problems and performance of flash on mobile devices read this analysis by GigaOm on why Flash Mobile did not work out.
Give it some thought when you make an investment in your website. With site visits by mobile devices quickly climbing towards 15% to 20% of the total site visits, according to IBM, it is a very important marketing consideration. For your website and marketing it seems that “to Flash or not to Flash” is the question. With Adobe putting its money on HTML5 for its future shouldn’t you?
It seems time to revisit some of the basic issues. Do you remember April 2010 and Steve Jobs’ thoughts on Flash? particularly concerning security, reliability and performance?
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?
In retrospect Steve Jobs had reasoned answers, before hardly any of us had even thought of the question.
