Gone in a Flash: How Adobe’s abandonment of Flash for mobile devices impacts news orgs

niemanlabs reporting: Jason Perlow at ZDNet broke a pretty big story overnight: Adobe is abandoning development of the mobile version of Flash Player. As the text of the announcement Perlow obtained has it:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

The writing’s been on the wall for some time that mobile would be Flash’s undoing. Flash eats battery life and sucks up a lot of CPU power — both things you might take for granted with a desktop or plugged-in laptop, but both significant concerns for anything pocket-sized. Adobe also took a long time coming out with even buggy, slow, and crashy versions of Flash for mobile, none of which ever reached a particularly high level of polish.
And all that’s before even mentioning Steve Jobs and his efforts to keep Flash out of Apple’s mobile platforms. By building a new product category that doesn’t run Flash, Jobs pushed Flash-using websites to create non-Flash equivalents or walk away from the technology altogether.
Adobe’s announcement doesn’t mean Flash is going away — its player for PCs and Macs will still be developed. But it does mean that any web publisher who was holding out for (a) Flash for mobile to get a whole lot better and (b) Apple to realize the error of its ways can now officially abandon hope. That means adopting alternatives.
(An aside: The Steve Jobs bio makes it clear that Jobs’ affections for Adobe had shrunk long before Flash-on-iPhones became an issue. In 1999, Jobs asked Adobe to build a version of Adobe Premiere for the Mac to allow a good video-editing experience. Adobe turned him down, saying the Mac was too puny a market to worry about. Apple responded by releasing Final Cut Pro and iMovie, which became huge forces in the market. “I put Adobe on the map” — by making the Mac the premier platform for desktop publishing and printing with Adobe tech — “and they screwed me,” Walter Isaacson quotes Jobs as saying.)
What’s the impact for news organizations? For their websites, Flash has had three primary uses: video, interactive graphics, and ads.
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