Following Adobe’s recent abandonment of their mobile Flash plugin, Adobe Flash product manager Mike Chambers has stepped forward to shed more light on Adobe’s decision. In short, Chambers points to Apple as the most significant factor.
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… Just to be very clear on this. No matter what we did, the Flash Player was not going to be available on Apple’s iOS anytime in the foreseeable future.
Chambers also pointed out that strong support for HTML 5 reduced Flash’s chances of success on mobile platforms, stating that “it simply made more sense to create an HTML5 based solution.”
Chambers has also removed all arguments from his personal website claiming that Flash was still ideal for touch (or mobile platforms). At this point, it’s basically confirmed that Apple was the driving force behind Adobe’s abandonment of mobile Flash (is anyone really surprised?)
