Flash Is Dead, Long Live Flash - on the Desktop and Mobile Devices

Mobile Flash is dead, Adobe made it clear. But this doesn't mean Flash in general is dead, far from it. Adobe just cut its loses short in a battle where even winning meant owning maybe half the market and instead focused on Flash's key strengths.

Flash is powerful technology, there's no denying that. The problem has always been the performance of the Flash Player, especially on mobile devices.

Flash lives on in mobile devices via AIR

And this is what Adobe has killed, the mobile Flash Player. But Flash can still be useful on the mobile front and Adobe plans to continue to milk the technology with the help of AIR.

AIR enables developers to create apps, mostly games, with Flash and then have them packaged for several platforms, including mobile devices, crucially, including the iOS platform.

This means that Flash content will continue to exist on mobile devices, Android, iPhone and so on, but it will be in native apps and not in the browser.

"Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores," Adobe wrote.

Flash will thrive on the desktop for years to come

At the same time, Flash will continue to thrive on the desktop, despite the somewhat increasing competition from the likes of HTML5 and even WebGL.

The fact is, for now, Flash is untouchable on the desktop. HTML5 animations can't achieve the same level of complexity and performance as Flash animations as for interactivity, it's not even a competition.

This is even more true now that Flash has gotten hardware accelerated 3D capabilities. There is a standard alternative, WebGL, but 3D support in Flash seems more solid for now.

"Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection.  Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers," Adobe boasts.