The Inevitable End of the Flash Era

Adobe has some really cool things pointed at the Internet these days, much more than what they are doing in the print space. A friend pointed me to this nifty open source framework they've shipped, called PhoneGap. Mobile Internet, and "multi-screen" are the hottest areas for developers, so it should come as no surprise that this is where Adobe's attention is focused.

As for the Internet goodies, apparently Flash is no longer part of their plans for the future. The writing has been on the wall since Steve Jobs started his anti-Flash crusade roughly three years ago.

Last November, Adobe announced that it would stop the development of Flash for mobile devices. This week, Adobe disabled new installs of Flash on Android devices. If this really means Flash is done for Android, this is really a huge milestone. I mean, Flash is still "ubiquitous", and a lot of work will have to be done to completely erase it from the web. In fact, it's likely that remnants will be around for many years.

Steve Jobs would be completely stoked. As we may recall, he started this whole thing in early 2010 by calling out Flash as "evil." He, almost single-handedly, made HTML 5 as the platform of choice for mobile content. Obviously HTML 5 is growing in adoption on the desktop, too-- limited primarily by the unfortunate staying power of ancient browsers on user desktops.

Anyone who uses Flash now for anything except games and certain video applications is making a bad technical decision. And unless you already have lots of Flash expertise in house, you should move on-- because the best developers will have little interest in working with this platform from now on.