11:00 AM
The Mobile
Flash on mobile - which at one point was held up as the key differentiator between Apple's iOS platform and others including RIM's PlayBook - is having the dates for its death laid out.
Adobe has announced in a blog post that from 15 August 2012 it will stop any new installations of its Flash Player onto Android devices, and that only devices which already have a mobile version of its Flash player already installed will be updated.
It's a logical conclusion to the process that Adobe announced in November 2011, when it said that it would no longer be updating Flash Player for new devices, apart from bug fixes and security updates; effectively, Flash on mobile was a zombie from that point on.
Given that smartphones and tablets now outsell PCs by a substantial margin, of about 50% - around 150m per quarter compared to 100m at most - the decision renews the question of how much longer Flash on the desktop will survive.
For mobiles, it won't be in stalled onto the just-announced Android 4.1 (aka "Jelly Bean"), and Adobe says that while Flash Player might work on the platform, it also might "exhibit unpredictable behaviour".
The idea that being able to run Flash is a key differentiator for Android has suddenly gone away: upcoming devices will be on parity with iOS ones in that regard, and given the astonishing growth of Android activations (presently one million per day), Flash installations will diminish as a share of mobile share very quickly. RIM's decision not to install it by default on its BB7 devices last year didn't help; and its PlayBook tablet, for which it claimed that being able to run it was a key element in web browsing.
Since its launch in April 2011, a total of 1.01m PlayBooks have been shipped from RIM to retailers; it took Apple 28 days to sell that many when it was first introduced, suggesting Flash capability was never sufficient to change a purchasing decision.
The announcement means that just over two years after Steve Jobs's 2010 "Thoughts on Flash" essay was published on Apple's site, Flash is hitting the wall.
Adobe says that Flash on the PC platform (if you define "PC platform" as "Intel computers running browsers that allow the Flash plugin" - which excludes the forthcoming WinRT tablets using ARM chips running Windows 8, and also could exclude Internet Explorer 10) will continue.
Jobs said that Apple wouldn't put Flash onto its mobile devices because "Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it."
Apple launched the iPhone (five years ago now) without Flash because the team behind it was not confident about its effects on browser stability and battery life. But in the runup to the launch, Jobs was able to take advantage of the presence at the time on Apple's board of Google's then-chief executive, Eric Schmidt, and persuade him to get YouTube - then as now the biggest user of Flash video on the web - to remove the Flash wrapping from the content, so that the H.264 video would play natively on the iPhone.
But for millions of other sites, there was no alternative initially to Flash - which meant that when the iPhone kicked off mobile browsing growth in the US, many protested at the lack of Flash support on the phone. Jobs's response: tough - and the web is evolving away from one company's proprietary form of showing video (Flash) to other video formats. Ironically, initially that was H.264, which is patent-heavy (though with a large pool of patent contributors). Google has been trying to edge some of that out with its WebM video format, but even Mozilla decided to throw in the towel and
At the start of 2011, Adobe said that about 20m devices had Flash in their browser; by the end of 2011 it was expecting the figure to hit 200m. No figure has been announced for the numebr of installations.
However, with Apple having by that time activated a total of around 315m iOS device, compared to an estimated 250m Android devices, it was clear that non-Flash-playing devices would remain a significant part of the market - and that Adobe's attempts to make it a buying differentiator weren't effective.
Meanwhile, the promise that a really great version of Flash on mobile was just around the corner was made repeatedly down the years. It didn't happen.
Here's the key paragraph from the blogpost:
Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit c ontinued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th.
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