Apple has been getting a lot of heat over the years for their refusal to support Adobe’s Flash software. Companies such as Nokia, RIM, and even Google in the mean time have proudly been standing tall and shouting at the top of their lungs about how their platforms are technically superior because they can render every website that exists on the internet. Steve Jobs, till the day he died, firmly held on to the belief that Adobe should go screw themselves. In fact, he even wrote a 1,700 word letter explaining Apple’s logic back in April 2010:
“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. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath.”
Here we are, less than a month after Jobs has passed, and Adobe has given up. Here’s the internal Adobe memo that was leaked to ZD|Net announcing the good news:
“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.”
So what’s Adobe going to focus on now? What they should have been doing all along: HTML5 and other associated native web technologies.
[Image above of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen]
Update 1: Here’s the full, official blog post from Adobe.
Update 2: RIM has pledged that they’ll support Flash on their own.