Adobe Pulling Flash Out From Mobile Scene

Last year, Adobe surprised everyone when they announced that they are pulling the plug on popular plugin, Flash, from the mobile scene. The company’s been pushing through the plugin so that it could integrate into the mobile devices while facing fierce competition with HTML5. It made headway with Android which remains an open platform. But the happiness was short-lived when the company announced that it will disable future updates and installs from Android as well. Adobe first promised a fuller experience on all mobile devices with flash but sort of failed to live up to what HTML5 could do. Hence, the sudden pull-out.

For some Adobe supporters, this seems like such difficult-to-digest news because they were supportive and enthusiastic about Adobe’s grand plans for mobile Flash. The biggest problem for them was that they had no way to convince Apple to adopt it. When Steve Jobs was alive, word has it that he was dead against the plan to integrate what Flash had to offer onto any Apple device. In fact, he famously fought against it while giving the nod for HTML5.

Supporters started to see glimmers of hope when Android adopted it. It seems that Android, being an open system, is just about game for anything so, Flash was sure that they were game.

But this is not to say that Flash is completely dead. All we are saying is that Flash is not right for mobile devices while it continues to dominate on the desktop. To Apple’s credit, they are not the only company that said no to Flash on mobile, Microsoft cast the vote in favor of HTML5 too which was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.

The November 2011 announcement means that Flash will be withdrawn from Android devices too, shutting it out from nearly ninety percent of mobile devices.

This is not a dead-end for Adobe, of course, with Flash being only ONE of their many other products and services. The company’s merely going to map out another plan and redefine their focus. It seems that the company will push in the direction of providing people with better videos and improved experiences while playing games on desktops and laptops.

HTML5 is a well-known danger to Adobe and we are wondering what Adobe have under their sleeves about improving what they have to offer.