Adobe has announced they will shut down Flash support for mobile devices and concentrate on Adobe AIR and HTML5:
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. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. 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.
We all know Apple’s decision to bypass Adobe and provide Flash support on iOS devices, as mentioned in a rant posted a while back by Steve Jobs.
His anger towards Adobe goes back to 1999, when he asked the company to make Adobe Premiere for a new version of the iMac. Adobe shunned Jobs, and this made him furious. As he said in his biography:
“I put Adobe on the map, and they screwed me.”
Walter Isaacson writes Jobs never forgot this, and got his revenge soon later:
“Jobs never forgave Adobe, and a decade later he got into a public war with the company by not permitting Adobe Flash to run on the iPad.”
Looks like you’ve won, Steve. The Flash war is over.
