One of the biggest selling features that RIM and the Android device manufacturers have pushed in commercials and announcements is Flash support in their products. You can see how important the manufacturers perceive Flash by viewing their promotional material. On the Playbook website, RIM proclaims it offers the “uncompromised web”, with support for HTML 5 and Flash 10.2 giving you “all the Internet has to offer”. RIM also released an ad focusing entirely on their tablet’s ability to utilize Flash Player in web browsing. Samsung states on their website that the Galaxy Tab 10.1 lets you visit “thousands of top websites” that use “rich Flash applications”, and that the Galaxy S II’s “Adobe Flash Player capabilities let you get the full multimedia experience”. All this support behind it would have you believe that Flash is still going to be prominent and expanding in the near future, but this month Adobe announced that it will no longer develop Flash Player for mobile devices or TVs, throwing a wrench into the plans of these companies.
Flash Player has been around for almost as long as our fellow first year engineers, providing web developers with a way to include animations in their webpages. The term “animation” has become almost symbolic at this point, as Flash Player is also used to display video, games and interactive websites. During Flash’s peak it was uncommon, to say the least, to find a website that didn’t implement Adobe’s technology in some way. Some websites that used heavy animation were even completely Flash based. You may remember how many sites had loading bars on them even a few years ago. While many websites we use often still use Flash to display videos, there are now often fallback methods that enable users without Flash to be able to view them, typically now in the form of the HTML5 <video> tag.
Apple and Microsoft both have reduced their dependency on Flash to some degree over the past few years. Since the release of the first iPhone, Apple has not allowed Flash Player installation and this has extended to their other iOS devices as they have come out. Apple also now ships new Macs without Flash Player by default, requiring users to install it via Adobe’s website.
In Windows 8, which Microsoft is set to release next year, the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 will not have any support for plugins, including Flash Player. As for Windows Phone, Adobe and Microsoft indicated that they were working together to bring Flash Player to the operating system since March of last year, but that clearly never came to fruition and it seems pretty clear now that it won’t any time in the future. Microsoft is struggling to find success with Silverlight, its own Flash competitor, but still hopes to keep the development environment around as an easy way to create Metro applications.
While RIM and Google still have Adobe’s support for their existing configurations of Flash Player, Adobe won’t support any new operating system versions, chipsets, or browsers; essentially any sort of modification to an existing system following the release of Flash Player 11.1. RIM, who was arguably the most aggressive at marketing their Flash Player compatibility, has decided to start developing their own derivative of Flash Player in response to this news by licensing the source code from Adobe. Google hasn’t announced that they will develop their own version of Flash Player, but considering the number of devices they would have to support with the number of Android configurations available, they may opt to join Apple and Microsoft in fully embracing HTML5 and its related technologies (which I will refer to hereafter as just HTML5 for simplicity). This would make sense from Google’s standpoint given how strongly they’ve been pushing these technologies in their own web applications, especially in Gmail and their Google Apps. Considering how long it took Flash Player to arrive for Android and how mixed the user experience has been with the plugin, Google might be better off anyway having the plugin removed entirely.
The reasoning Adobe gave for finding no need to continue mobile Flash Player development was the ubiquity of HTML5 in the mobile space. HTML5 is supported by all the major mobile operating systems and Adobe is throwing its support behind helping advanced web developers utilize HTML5 by shifting resources towards tools that will make it easier to create that content. Upcoming editions of Creative Suite will have more integrated HTML5 tools. Adobe has a beta of Edge, its HTML5 animation tool, which has been out for some time that could end up being its own product or folded into Flash Professional (not to be confused with Flash Player, Flash Professional is the development environment).
Adobe’s focus on HTML5 doesn’t mean they’re getting rid of Flash entirely. It should be noted that they are only getting rid of Flash Player for non-desktop devices, which means it will still be around for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris for the near future. Adobe claims to be already developing Flash Player 12, which is set to bring a whole set of new features to push Flash’s capabilities on the desktop. They are also suggesting that mobile app developers use Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) to package Flash apps natively for the iOS App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.
While Adobe’s Flash applications, now regulated to the desktop browsers, and AIR applications might be useful for developers who want to create everything from the same development template, is it the best way to create these applications? The biggest detriment in my eyes of Adobe being in control of the whole package is that developers have to rely on Adobe to keep up with new technologies on each device before being able to implement them. If a manufacturer provides a new technology that they implement relatively quickly into a software update (such as when Apple enabled in-app purchasing or Game Center), then developers who are dependent on Adobe will have to wait for Adobe to add support for these technologies into an AIR update before packaging their applications for release.
So while Flash might be around for a while longer, it doesn’t appear that it will be used in the same way in five or ten years as it is now. Instead of being used to create its own files that get played within its own proprietary plugin that has to be installed on every computer, it will probably be used to provide developers an inefficient, lazy yet simple way to create applications for multiple devices. While by design it will never be as performance efficient as creating applications directly for each device, it could prove to be a stepping stone for newer developers towards creating applications natively. Some may claim that Flash Player becoming less relevant is a bad thing, but even for Adobe it paints a bright future, and those who are a fan of the Flash development environment can find comfort in the fact that AIR-packaged applications will probably have support for a long time into the future. When HTML5 looks like it’s starting to be able to accomplish most of the things Flash is able to do, why would anyone design multimedia for a bloated runtime environment when you could code once and have it run natively on every device by design?
Adobe has made some poor decisions on occasion to protect its own interests, but this is one that shows that it’s aware of what it can do well and what it can’t. If Adobe is throwing all of its support behind HTML5, expect a lot of people to start making animations, embedding videos and potentially even creating games that are rendered by the browser. As HTML and its supporting technologies get more advanced, browsers will need updating to see these new animations and games, and being able to run the latest browser will become more important than ever before. With the number of people still running Internet Explorer 6 and 7, let alone its other versions, maybe this isn’t a bad thing, and could be what’s needed to drive web technology forward.
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