Company to focus on HTML5 support, sources claim
Adobe will cease supporting Flash for mobile devices, according to an alleged leaked internal email.
The notice, sent to Adobe’s partners and then onto tech publication ZDNet, states that the company will turn its attention to native smartphone applications.
For browsers, the company will focus further on the HTML5 development framework, the message added.
“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores,” the email read.
“We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.”
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Today Adobe announced it is to cut as many as 750 workers across Europe and the US.
Flash had faced a challenging future with Apple outright blocking the popular format across its entire line of mobile devices.
A rapid shift in business strategy resulted in Adobe moving fast to launch its new HTML5 design tool.
That editor, called Adobe Edge, is free for developers to preview and allows customers to animate interactive HTML5 web pages.
Edge proved an instant hit, soaring past 50,000 downloads in its first 24 hours since launch.
Adobe has never suggested it would abandon Flash on desktop browsers. The ubiquitous player has become central to rich media on the open web, while the eleventh edition of the tech alows hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.
This comes as a bit of a surprise, Flash Player 11 is out and it rocks - major 3d engines are moving to support it. Flash works a treat on my Android phone, which always makes me smile as it goes against the whole Jobs letter.
Maybe the 3d capabilities in Flash Player 11 cannot be easily transferred to Mobile with more limited hardware? It seems like a dumb idea to axe mobile development - in the future you can expect mobile devices to be much more powerful and to replace more and more traditional users. If Adobe makes Flash a desktop-only experience then it would make no sense to develop browser-based Flash games anymore (which still kick ass and have generated billions of $ provided you're not on iOS). Flash was recently being touted as "the console for the web" and a great way for developers to bypass the 30% fees of appstores.
Well the new Focus is mobile Flash AIR. This makes sense since everybody either uses HTML5 for mobile in-browser games (e.g. Zynga) (because of iOS' lack of in-browser Flash) or uses Flash/AIR to build an app that can be sold in app stores. Adobe's "new" focus on technology that allows to build monetizable applications makes totally sense to me. If you want an in-Browser-Game use HTML5 - all mobile devices (will) support it. If you want to build a rich interactive cross-platform application Flash AIR is your new friend.
Am I the only one who sees js/HTML5 as a step backwards. JavaScript is a terribly inefficient specification for gaming. Sure there is Gears and the V8 engine, but everything I've tried gives the equivalent performance of how flash was performing on machines with a quarter of the processing power the machine I am using has.
HTML is fine for writing text, and we've managed to create lavish layouts with tables, CSS and DHTML, but it's such a terrible hack I would have much rather seen Flash lose out to something new or just better than Flash.
The tools are lagging, everything JS is still sluggish, it's horrible. A mess if I'm being fair.
So what if all these devices "support" HTML5/JS, because HTML5/JS just might not support the possibility of good games, how about that, eh?
I've just tried WebGL (which I couldn't do on my other machine due to the graphics card). I am impressed and can definitely see a future for it.
They're only really got to address the keyboard and mouse input as there are still some serious quirks to sort out there. Other than that I'm quite happy with what I've seen from it.
