14 DAY TRIAL // Apparently, the Flash Player is indeed a lost cause on the mobile space, and Adobe is aware of that, thus choosing to put an end to its development and focus on other technologies for the future.
Today, the company went official with plans to kill off Flash on mobile browsers, making room for HTML5 to become the king in the area.
Flash will continue to exist on mobile phones, but development for it will come to an end as soon as Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook arrives on devices.
Adobe will continue to offer support for it, and will also enable application developers come up with software based on Flash and packaged with Adobe AIR.
However, there will be no more advancements when it comes to Flash Player in mobile browsers, Adobe notes, putting its name on the death certificate of a technology available for various mobile devices for the past two years.
“However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms,” Adobe explains in a blog post.
“We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.”
Although it will kill off the development of Flash Player for mobile browsers, Adobe will continues to offer fixes for the software, as well as updates for existing configurations, the company notes.
“We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations,” Adobe states.
As for Flash developers, they will be able to continue building applications using Adobe's tools, and will also have them available for millions of devices through major mobile app stores, including iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.