The Death of Adobe Flash Player

The internet provides many facets of multimedia. Adobe Flash is one application that streams movies, music and interactive media. The technology was created by Macromedia for developers and designers, but was later bought by Adobe.

One of the largest contributions to Flash Players death is the Apple controversy. When the iPhone was released, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs made the decision to not support Flash on the iPhone. This decision, followed by the sudden popularity of the iPhone, urged the tech world to produce web content compatible that would not require Flash Player. It wasn’t a sudden switch though, YouTube playback wasn’t supported on the iPhone until after the iPhone 4 was release in June 2010.

Another contribution to the decline in Adobe Flash player is the rise of HTML5 support and overall performance. When HTML5 video support was introduced to Safari 4 (2008), Firefox 3.5 (2009) and finally Internet Explorer 9 (2011), developers began to take note of the increased performance over Flash Player. Naturally, HTML5 became the decision of choice for interactive media for the reason of performance.

Flash is still used all over the web. The software is still used for video streaming, ads and even games. Even so, Flash is being used less as HTML5 becomes the preferred platform of choice for its optimized performance and cross-device compatibility.

The Apple fiasco

• Steve Jobs decided iPhone would not support Flash. The decision was supported with Flash’s limitation. The issues cause a painful experience for Apple platforms.

Drain on the phone battery

• Devices that support Flash suffer battery drain and performance issues. Wouldn’t it be nice if we did not have to charge our phone every night?

Poor reliability, security and performance

• Symatec noted Flash as having one of the worst security performances in 2009. Flash is a primary reason that Mac’s crash.

Flash was designed for pointing devices

• Flash was developed for PC’s and does support touch-screen events. Developers can design Flash applications for tablets/phones/touch devices.

Google developed Swiffy to convert Flash files to HTML5. Swiffy causes Flash content accessible to devices without Flash Players (iPhones and Androids). You don’t need to download the software.
Steve Jobs knew that he could not limit the information accessible to the public on the internet when launching the IPhone. YouTube created video viewing software for mobile devices. YouTube replaces Flash’s operations.

By the end of 2013 there were two smartphones for every nine people or a total of 1.4 billion phones sold. iPhone and Android need software that can continue to grow with device ownership. Mobile subscription reaches over 100% of the population in many countries and many individuals own multiple devices. Adobe Flash has not provided that updates that iPhone and Android needs to operate with devices. If Flash Player wants to resurrect, Adobe must provide the updates that mobile devices need to operate fluidly!