Flash is Dead, and It’s Apple’s Fault

Well, according to Adobe at least, Apple is the one to blame for the recent death of Flash. Adobe recently made the passing of flash official, all while touting HTML5 as the way of the future. This all comes as quite a surprise for anyone familiar with Adobe’s persistence in keeping the platform alive despite Apple’s unwillingness to include it in their iOS platforms.

Steve Jobs made Apple’s stance on not including Flash in iOS devices like the iPad and iPhone clear in an open letter entitled “Thoughts on Flash”. He also stated in the past that Adobe could never show Apple Flash running smoothly on an iPhone.

However, this was only following Adobe’s public frustration with Apple’s decision to not include it. Apple’s stance was HTML5, in combination with CSS and JavasScript, would replace Flash as the new open standard for graphically rich animations in browsers, starting with iOS as the forerunner.

After repeatedly trying to prove Apple wrong, Adobe has finally ceased development of Flash on mobile devices while agreeing that HTML5 is the “best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”

However, if you ask Flash engineer Mike Chambers, Apple’s resistance to including Flash in their devices is what ultimately lead to its demise, not that it was necessarily a dying technology as some would have you believe. Here’s a snippet from his blog post which aimed to clarify the details of the announcement:

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.

The fate of the future of Flash development for desktop computers would still appear to be going strong, with Adobe reporting that 75% of online videos are still coded using flash.

But many of those videos are also encoded in formats like H.264, which can be played right in an HTML5-enabled browser, indicating that HTML5 will play a much larger role in Adobe’s strategy going forward.

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