Amid layoffs and a reorganization around digital content, Adobe today confirmed via a post on its company blog that the Adobe Flash Player for mobile devices is going the way of the dinosaur, in deference of HTML5.
“HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,” wrote Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of interactive development for Adobe. “This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.”
In light of the change, Adobe said it will continue to work with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Research In Motion (RIM) to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
All future work with Flash on mobile devices, Winokur wrote, will now be aimed at enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all of 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,” Winokur wrote.
Adobe said it would continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations, while also allowing the company’s source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.
Adobe is a champion of HMTL5 technology, which allows developers to write an app once and then deploy it across multiple platforms. To that end, a developer could write an app in HTML5 and have it immediately available on PCs, iOS and Android devices.
