When Adobe announced last week that it will kill development of Flash Player for the mobile Web, many joked that Steve Jobs was likely chuckling from above.
But in a blog post explaining the decision, Mike Chambers, principal product manager for developer relations at Adobe, admitted that Apple's decision not to support Flash Player on iOS was one of the major factors in its demise.
"The Flash Player was not going to achieve the same ubiquity on mobile as it has on the desktop," Chambers wrote. "This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple's iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops."
Adobe said last week that it would no longer develop Flash Player for the mobile Web, and instead focus its efforts on AIR apps and HTML5. The company will continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations, like the BlackBerry PlayBook and Android devices.
Lest you think Jobs's passing might have prompted Apple to re-examine Flash, Chambers said that "no matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to be available on Apple's iOS anytime in the foreseeable future."
In April 2010, Jobs famously penned a note posted to the Apple Web site in which he called Flash closed, unstable, and antiquated.
As a result, those who wanted to use Flash for the mobile Web had to develop something that supported Flash and HTML5. But given the strong support for HTML5, "it simply made more sense to create an HTML5 based solution," Chambers said. "On mobile devices, [HTML5] has a level of ubiquity similar to what the Flash Player has on the desktop."
HTML5 also does not have the problem of creating a mobile version of a legacy browser tool like Flash Player did, Chambers said. "Our goal has always been to obtain the same level of ubiquity for the Flash Player on mobile browsers, but, at the end of the day, it is something that did not, and was not going to happen," he said.
Doing "specific work for different combinations of OS, Hardware and event components has taken a significant amount of resources," Chambers said, which is "simply not scalable or sustainable."
Furthermore, users are increasingly going to apps instead of the browser to consume rich content on mobile devices, Chambers said. "Essentially, users' preferences to consume rich content on mobile devices via applications means that there is not as much need or demand for the Flash Player on mobile devices as there is on the desktop," he wrote.
Beyond the mobile Web, though, Chambers stressed that "Flash is not dead, [but its] role and focus has shifted."
For more, see Adobe Flash Meets Its End and No Flash Forwarding to HTML5.