Last week, Adobe stunned the tech world when it announced it was no longer going to develop Flash Player for Google"s Android operating system (along with the Blackberry Playbook). Adobe"s official announcement didn"t provide much information about why the decision was made.
A few days later, Mike Chambers, one of Adobe"s developers, decided to write a lengthy post on his personal blog that went into more detail surrounding the move to pull future Android support for Flash. One big reason was that Flash was never going to be used on mobile platforms as much as the PC desktop.
Chambers said, "This effectively meant that if you wanted to use Flash to deliver a rich web experience in the browser on mobile devices you would have to provide both a Flash based, as well as HTML5 based solution. Given the strong support for HTML5 across modern mobile devices, it simply made more sense to create an HTML5 based solution."
There were also issues with how people used Flash on a mobile device as opposed to a desktop web browser. That included things like screen size, resolution, network latency issues and more. Adobe found that users on mobile devices used stand alone applications more than web browser-based programs. Finally, the growth of HTML5 as a platform for web-based applications for mobile devices made Flash less viable.
Chambers said, "I understand that not everyone may not agree with all of the conclusions drawn above. However, given these points, along with the increasing complexity and costs of developing the Flash Player for mobile browsers, we decided that further development was not the best use of our engineering resources."