14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe's decision to kill the mobile Flash Player browser plugin has generated a lot of debate. The discussion, unfortunately and predictably, tends to gravitate around 'flashy' statements such as "Apple has won," or "Steve Jobs was right" or "Flash is dead."
The reality is a bit more complex than that. Mike Chambers, Adobe's developer relations lead for the Flash platform, decided to clear up things a bit, more than what Adobe has managed so far.
In a rather lengthy post, he tackles most of the issues surrounding Adobe's move and some of the arguments are quite interesting and perhaps the clearest yet coming from Adobe.
He first tackles the big question, why Adobe killed mobile Flash, and he provides several answers. Unsurprising perhaps, Apple's refusal to include Flash is on top of the list.
As he makes it clear, Flash Player was never going to enjoy the amount of market share it has on the desktop on mobile phones, simply because it couldn't get in Apple devices.
No matter how hard Adobe tried, it would only own half the market maybe, not enough to get the benefit of scale and not enough to justify the resources Adobe spent on the mobile plugin.
Apple is just half of the equation, HTML5 is the second half. Because, not only was Flash never going to be ubiquitous on mobile devices, there is already something that is ubiquitous, HTML5.
Faced with the decision to develop for Flash and target half the devices or develop for HTML5, despite some of the limitations, and target all mobile devices, developers had an easy choice.
Which explains the second big decision Adobe made this week, a less surprising one, to focus more of its efforts on HTML5.
Chambers has a very candid explanation for this as well. He argues that, in time, all the features that have proven popular in Flash have eventually been built into browsers. He believes the trend will continue.
HTML5 is the perfect example of that, already HTML5 and CSS3 are enough to create website graphics that could only have been possible via Flash only a few years ago.
Flash itself is focusing on rich content, video and 3D graphics, but it won't be long until browsers and standard web technology catch up with that too.
So Adobe decided to embrace HTML5 and start creating tools for HTML5, CSS3 and so on. What's more, it's encouraging Flash developers and designers to start thinking about the future too and start working with the new technologies.
This is because, Chambers believe, the skills that Flash designers and developers have acquired over the years are exactly the skills needed to create great websites and web apps via HTML5 and CSS3.