When the iPhone 5 reaches its release date next year it’ll arrive, like all iPhones and iPads before it, without the mobile Flash Player. The difference is that any Android based phones and tablets arriving next year will be sans-Flash as well, as Flash maker Adobe announced today that mobile Flash has been discontinued. Adobe instead says mobile developers should use HMTL5, the same technology which Apple has been championing as a Flash alternative for a few years. This also means that Flash must die on the desktop, as website developers will need to cease using Flash across the board in order to ensure that mobile users never encounter it. It’s a victory not just for Apple but for the late Steve Jobs specifically, who publicly railed against Flash as being a buggy, insecure, resource-draining, outdated technology in an open letter a couple years ago. It puts the iPhone 5 in position to not have to fend off competing devices which ran Flash very poorly, but technically ran it nonetheless. And it leaves Android manufacturers, who had been using Flash as a marketing point, sulking while they look for their next marketing angle…
Apple’s argument for leaving Flash off the iPhone and iPad all these years was that while Adobe’s mobile Flash player existed, it crashed frequently and drained a mobile device’s battery unacceptably quickly. But that didn’t stop competing Android based devices from not only including mobile Flash, but building their marketing campaigns around Flash. That seemed to be a tenuous position, both because of how poorly Flash runs on mobile devices and because Adobe’s recent moves with new technologies like EDGE hinted that the company was leaning toward leaving Flash behind in favor of HTML 5. Now, Android makers are left holding the bag, having heavily marketed their devices as “Flash compatible” and now left having to explain to customers why, once the current and final mobile Flash iteration fades away, there’s no Flash after all. That leaves Apple with one less thing to worry about as it prepares to launch the iPhone 5 with a release date somewhere near the center of 2012…
In the bigger picture, the real burden is on website developers who’ve relied on Flash as a crutch, either because it’s part of their ideology, or because they don’t have the skills to use anything else, or because they’re lazy, or because the website proprietor had been insisting on it. Regardless of the prior reasons, the Flash era is now over. Officially killed on mobile devices, also dead on desktops as a result. With the long-obsolete Flash no longer available at a marketing tool, one has to wonder if Android manufacturers might now turn their attention to adding a floppy drive or some other equally outdated technology they can brag about having. In the mean time, chalk it up to a posthumous victory for Steve Jobs, who fought hard to convince the world to move beyond Flash to HTML 5. And those eyeing next year’s iPhone 5 should feel some excitement at the notion that web developers now have no choice but to begin removing Flash from all corners of the internet and replacing it with more modern web components which the iPhone and iPad will have no trouble displaying. Here’s more on the iPhone 5.