Mobile Flash is dead

Last week Adobe announced that it would end development of Flash on mobile platforms like smartphones and tablets. It said, "We are no longer going to be actively developing the Flash Player for Mobile Browsers." This is disappointing, but at the same time it is also not surprising.

The reason is that Flash works fine on Windows computers, but the company has always had difficulties getting it to run satisfactorily on other platforms. For example, it has been on the Apple Mac for years, but Flash has had problems with performance and using too much resources. In fact, at times in the past Flash has been so bad on OS X that some MacBook laptop users disabled Flash and prevented it from running using utilities like Click to Flash (go to the Safari menu and click Extensions to install it). Open a couple of web browser tabs with Flash on, even simple adverts, and the CPU usage would be up to 50 or 60%!

Adobe converted Flash to the Android platform and it appeared on some smartphones and tablets, but it didn't take long for YouTube videos to appear that showed the battery charge running down at an alarming speed. Flash on mobile devices was not good and it still isn't. It sort of works, but it doesn't work well.

So Steve Jobs was right, Flash has no place on mobile devices. However, it is hard to see why Flash couldn't have been made to work on mobiles and tablets. Some have fast dual core processors and lots of memory and future models will surely be even more powerful. Adobe just seems to have given up. Perhaps HTML5 and other technologies are simply better in the long run. That may be true, but there are a lot of websites right now using Flash that can't be accessed on mobile devices and it's irritating.