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Adobe have just announced they are dropping Flash Player development for mobile phones / tablets with immediate effect, so the current (v11) will be the last. Instead they'll be focussing on packaging Flash within apps and supporting HTML5 more.

Pretty major change of direction, especially as Flash support has been one of the main selling points of Android over iOS.

Another victory for Steve Jobs as well, from beyond the grave.

Apple 1 - Adobe 0,  hopefully we will soon be seeing STFC player on the iPhone.  Happy days.

I know apple have always refused to entertain flash player on the iPhone but that is all I know. Please enlighten me to how this news would change things.

Flash is old technology anyway. It's not the most efficient.

Adobe have obviously seen the light and realised that HTML5 is the future.

It's not going to change anything over night. It's just another nail in the coffin for Flash and will speed up the transition to HTML5 for multimedia on websites. It's especially a big deal as Apple and Adobe were having a pissing match over Flash on mobiles a year or so ago, Adobe have basically folded and said Apple were right.

Spot on good explanation there.  Things certainly won't change over night but one of my biggest gripes with my iPhone and iPad was lack of flash support.  As sites that currently use flash move to HTML 5 things will get better and better for iPhone users.

In the future it would make sense for all things will gravitate towards HTML5, who wants to maintain two systems, flash and HTML5. Might even get an ipad when Apple are forced to drop its price to sensible levels.

But I can't quite understand why Adobe have gone down this route. Were they fighting a loosing battle with standardisation? Or does flash offer a superset of HTML5, meaning we'll end up with a "mobile" HTML5 version of a site, and a better Flash based site (unlikely I think)? Or has it become commercially unviable for them?

Commercially unviable in the medium term - over the next 3 years mobile devices will overtake PC's in terms of volume and in terms of support Adobe were on a slippery slope once Microsoft announced windows 8 would not support it.

The whole world of communication is being turned on its head as the need for computing speed is replaced by the need for extended battery life and functionality.  Flash was a battery hog that sucked the life out of system memory and was never going to improve.

Anyone at Gartners symposium this week in Barcelona will understand how much we will all be affected  by this over the next 5 years

Definitely good news. As much as it's been said this is down to the Adobe/Apple war there is more to it than that - the heavy players are throwing everything behind HTML5.

Adobe don't make any money directly from Flash Player (which is what we're talking about), they make their money by selling development tools. So it's unlikely they'll lose anything from this, their products are the industry standard for web development and that isn't going to change anytime soon - increasing HTML5 support will only benefit their sales.

There are already a lot of sites that have a Flash and a non-Flash version, same as there are mobile optimised versions as well. That won't change much either for the time being but more and more sites will switch to HTML5 only. It's not that simple though as desktop browser support for HTML5 isn't as advanced as on mobiles, so that will delay things a bit.

Aha, that was the accelerator then. Missed that announcement. You can shun Apple OS, but once Microsoft ditches too you are screwed.

Yeah but as usual it took Apple to wake Microsoft up...

Microsoft have a diabolical support of web standards, so I find it quite amusing that they plan to drop support for flash (which I dislike intensely - flash that is), but will support HTML5. Until recently their support of XHTML 4.01 was a fucking joke. If you go back as far as IE6, or even more recent versions like 7 or 8, their browsers were an absolute joke and often required their own tweaked code.

It's a bit misleading to say Windows 8 won't support Flash. The 'metro' version (the new interface derived from Windows Mobile) of IE10 doesn't support plugins so won't run Flash, but there will be an alternate 'desktop' version that does.