Mobile Flash Is Officially Dead, Neither Users nor Adobe Will Miss It

Adobe has made it official, it's dropping the mobile Flash Player. The upcoming Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook will be the last release, there will only be security fixes after that.

That sounds like a huge move and it is. But it's not as tragic as it may seem, from any point of view.

On the one hand, Flash never really worked properly on mobile devices, if the decision to kill it is evidence of one thing it's this. Anyone who has had the misfortune of actually getting Flash to run on a smartphone or tablet knows this.

So there's hardly any user that is going to miss it. Sure, there'll be the occasional die hard fan who will come out and say that Flash is critical on mobile phones and that the world can't go on without it, but for regular users the move makes little difference.

Adobe could have spent countless resources and time trying to optimise Flash, but if it couldn't do it in two years it was never going to do it.

Performance problems alone wouldn't have gotten mobile Flash killed though, like it hasn't gotten the desktop version killed either.

But the fact that more than half of the smartphone and tablet market, i.e. Apple, was never going to have Flash, made any progress on the performance front moot.

It is a combination of these two factors that killed off mobile Flash. Apple's decision to refuse Flash also led to developers looking for alternatives and they found one, albeit not a perfect one, HTML5.

With the increasing use of HTML5 on the mobile web and the poor performance which led to little use in the first place of mobile Flash, regular users are not going to miss the mobile Flash Player.

But, the thing is, neither is Adobe. It's been pouring quite a lot of resources in mobile Flash for very little return on its investment.

Flash is still doing very well on the desktop, so Adobe is going to continue to make roughly the same amount of money selling authorship tools for Flash as it has so far, maybe even more since it's cutting down on cost.

On the other hand, Adobe is doubling down on HMTL5 and it hopes that by driving adoption on the mobile front, it can cash in by selling its new HTML5 authorship tools.