• MOST READ

• LATEST NEWS

Adobe's strategies over the past year have shown that it accepted the eventual victory of HTML5 over Flash, and recognized that this would happen most quickly on the mobile platforms where its own technology had been less successful than on PCs. The company has been investing in HTML5 and preparing itself to coexist with the newer system, but its new restructuring ditches mobile Flash altogether after the forthcoming new release.

The complete conversion to Flash is not surprising in itself, but the rapid timing would have been unthinkable until only recently. Even at last month's MAX developer event, Adobe was still talking in terms of many years of life for mobile Flash, despite the high profile hostility of Apple.

Adobe says it will stop providing updates to its Flash software for mobile devices and will use HTML5 for its mobile activities after the current release. As Adobe put it: "HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms."

The new browser standard has clear advantages over Flash, allowing web applications to look and behave almost like native apps, and without plug-ins, though it does not yet approach the functionality of full-blown Flash. But it has many huge companies and millions of developers working to improve that situation, and Adobe could not compete with that level of resource. While Flash was a huge force on PCs, it never achieved the same dominance in the mobile world, where its Lite version was excluded from the iPhone and accused of being a power hog, while the promise to bring the fully fledged version to handsets was beset by many delays.

After Adobe releases Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook in the near future, it will "no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations", though it will keep issuing bug fixes and security updates for existing users. The change of direction does not affect PCs, and the firm is already working on Flash Player 12 to increase desktop functionality as well as enabling "a smooth transition to HTML 5".

Having set out an HTML5 coexistence path in the summer, the company shifted more clearly towards migration at its MAX event. The three key elements in that cloud/mobile/web push were Touch Apps, new features for the Edge toolset, and the acquisition of Nitobi, maker of the PhoneGap open source framework, which supports development in HTML, CSS and JavaScript for various mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, Symbian, BlackBerry and bada.

Related Stories

COMMENTS

No comments yet. Be the first to add a comment!

Carrier Broadband Performance: Africa & Middle East
Carriers are using mobile broadband as their weapon of choice in the fight against the commoditization of voice and falling ARPU. This...

Voice over LTE: Market Analysis and Forecasts
VoLTE offer unique advantages in lowering a carrier's voice infrastructure economics and promises to improve voice quality, device...