Adobe recently announced that it was effectively killing Flash for mobile devices, and the company’s Principal Product Manager has felt the need to take to his blog and share the reasons that Flash failed.
Hardware fragmentation, the growth of HTML5, and Apple itself all played into Adobe’s decision to end Flash.
Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager at Adobe:
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.
The ubiquity of HTML5 made Flash obsolete:
Related to the point above, HTML5 has very strong support on modern mobile devices and tablets. Indeed, on mobile devices, it has a level of ubiquity similar to what the Flash Player has on the desktop. While performance and implementations haven’t always been great or consistent across devices, they have continued to improve at a pretty dramatic rate (just look at the insane Canvas performance increases between iOS 4 and 5).
Apple’s App Store and the success of apps in general have pushed users away from Flash:
On the desktop, users are used to consuming rich content (such as games and applications) via both the browser and native applications. However, on mobile devices users are much more likely to look exclusively toward applications for consuming rich content. The mobile platforms make it very easy to discover new content and applications by providing tight integration between the app stores (Apple App Store, Android Marketplace, etc..) and the mobile operating system. In general, users do not look to the web on mobile devices for finding and consuming rich content (such as games and applications).
Chambers goes on to list other factors, like the difficultly involved in making Flash plugins for multiple mobile browsers. Adobe is shifting its focus towards AIR and HTML5 development. Flash will continue to be supported on the desktop.
We recommend reading Steve Jobs’ incredible letter on Flash from last year. We’re sure that he would say something along the lines of “good riddance” today.
Alex Heath is a journalist who works for Tech Insider. He’s the former co-host of The CultCast. He has been quoted by the likes of the BBC, KRON 4 News, and books like “ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation.” He lives in Lexington, Kentucky. If you want to pitch a story, share a tip, or just get in touch, additional contact information is available on his personal site. Follow him on Twitter.
26 responses to “Adobe’s Product Manager Explains Why Flash Failed”
At last… We should let Flash die peacefully….
Interesting, no where did he tell the truth, that they could not get it to run reliably on iOS. Had they done this they would have still been in the race.
Peacefully? . . . Nah, let’s kick it in ass on its way to the grave.
Not really. Even Windows would crash and hang sometimes because of Flash. Latency would be 2 times in 5 times compared to html5 which is 0.5.
And as soon as you get Flash off of my computer the better I’ll be.
This is more PR spin from Adobe. If Flash ran well on mobile devices, it would have instantly gained acceptance. Chambers avoids any mention that Flash ran simply terrible on mobile devices, just like Steve said, but it appears Adobe can’t admit to it and come clean–probably out of a misguided idea that it would hurt their reputation. Flash is a battery and processor hog. They would gain points by admitting it.
*sending your message to Jim Balsillie… hope he still can read and hear properly though*
Flash has been and is crap.
You’re right … flash has been a POS all along….
I disagree. Flash is fine for desktop use for slideshows and simple movies embedded in web sites–until the mobile revolution happened. As a web site designer, I used Flash to create many different slideshows, and it worked well and was simple to set up. I rarely had a problem viewing Flash movies. I disliked Flash-based sites because the designers often produced overly flashy (pardon the pun) “bells and whistles” effects that were completely unnecessary, and actually got in the way of finding out about the service or product. This was not the fault of Flash, but it was easy to abuse.
On laptops and tablets, Flash was way too processor intensive and therefore battery draining. Adobe could never figure out how to make flash operate economically on these devices, especially on tablets and smartphones. Steve told Adobe to show him Flash running stably and economically on iOS and they could never do it.
What I need now are html 5 tools that let me create slideshows that are easy to use and intuitive. I’ve been using Vertical Moon’s SWF ‘n Slide Pro to create slideshows for many years. It’s a great program and wonderfully easy to use. I need that kind of functionality in html 5, but no one has come up with it yet (that I’ve been able to find). Vertical Moon said they were looking into transitioning their tools to html 5, but that was over a year ago and I haven’t heard anything since.
he could have saved a lot of needless typing and just said “we couldn’t get it to work properly so we canned it”
Flash has been and continues to be too much of a resource drain even on desktop computers.
cry baby~