As if Apple’s mobile devices not supporting Flash was not enough to make anyone wanting to build web UI’s look elsewhere, Adobe ceased development of Flash plugins for mobile browsers.
What does this mean to your average Joe smartphone user? Basically that all Android and Playbook users will be joining the iOS folks in seeing “Flash support: No” added to the spec sheet of their devices. However, what this means to the web industry as a whole is more important.
In the last five years or so I noticed the unanimously negative attitude, almost even a disgust towards Flash from clients asking for a website build. As time went by it was more and more common to see a long requirements list for any sort of advanced UI feature and at the end of that list would be a strict “No Flash” demand. I will not go along with the usual rant of an Apple fan about how the original iPhone not supporting Flash virtually sealed its fate back in 2007, but saying that it was not one of the factors would be quite bold.
Web applications, the way they are now, are all about accessibility — the days of sites cheerfully greeting you with a warning “Please install Internet Explorer to view this site” when trying to see it through Netscape, are thankfully left back in the now-so-distant year 2000. So whether or not you are on the iOS bandwagon, when building a site you still want any of your visitors (and potentially customers) to see what you have to offer them, no matter what they are viewing it on. This is exactly the motivation that business clients have when asking for non-Flash sites.
All this, however, is not to say that there were not enough factors pulling Flash down besides Apple. Ever since Macromedia was acquired by the big and bad Adobe, the experience of using it on any device went from bad to worse. You could buy a brand new computer with all the specs maxed out to run the latest 3D games and still see the browser become unresponsive when a Flash banner decided to load on a page. When it came to mobile devices however, it was even more unbearable — the smirk that anyone who bought the original HTC Hero (first Android phone with Flash) back in 2009 used to get when they dragged their iPhone buddies through the spec sheet, was wiped off their face when they actually tried to view or better yet use any old Flash-powered application or game. Touch input did not work, frame rate was measured in seconds per frame rather than frames per second, in fact the only thing that did work reasonably well was ad banners, so you could not play games or watch videos properly, but you were always the millionth visitor to a site no doubt winning a valuable prize every time.
So in summary, the land of lost opportunities that Flash mobile was, has come to a logical halt and nobody is that surprised about it.