Adobe Will Cease Mobile Development For Flash

Adobe has declared that it will cease to develop its Flash Player for new mobile devices, as it looks instead to contribute more aggressively to the development of HTML5.

The company admitted that HTML5 is now the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms, and said that it will focus on working with key players in the HTML community, such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

“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,” Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of interactive development at Adobe, wrote in a blog post.

He added that the firm will continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations and will also allow its source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Adobe said it will increase its investment in HTML5 and wants to innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, such as advanced gaming and premium video.

It will also continue to support future Flash development on mobile devices, but this will be by enabling Flash developers to package native desktop applications for all the major app stores with the Adobe AIR runtime environment.

“Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection.  Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World,” concluded Winokur.