Adobe has officially discontinued developing Flash for mobile, and has announced that it will redirect its focus on “aggressively contributing” to HTML 5.
After years of struggling to produce a viable plugin for the mobile web, and despite the publicized standoffs with Apple, Adobe now has to bid farewell to developing Flash for mobile devices, despite its significance impact in the PC experience. But apparently, that’s as far as they can go and it looks like Steve Jobs was right all along.
Why did Flash have trouble transitioning to the mobile sphere? Some analysts say that part of the problem lies in its origins of having been a CPU-based design, requiring power from processors that mobile devices cannot allocate and accommodate. Since the Flash Player relies on the CPU and not GPU, mobile devices that have less power-hungry processors (in order to conserve battery life) results in Flash’s slower graphic performance.
So that essentially leads us to HTML 5, which is more stable and flexible, and will most likely be the standard for developers today and in the future. Adobe has confirmed however, that they will still provide bug fixes for current versions, and they will keep developing Flash for OS X and Windows (except for the upcoming Windows 8).