Now that’s a shocker: Adobe Rumoured to be ceasing Flash Plugin development for Android and Playbook

It’s been 4 years since the introduction of the iPhone and it’s easy to see what impression it’s left on what was an industry sector that had just settled down. Mobile phones were just on the cusp of providing users with instant, fast and constant data connections whilst touchscreen technology had just entered the marketplace. The iPhone arrived and shook up what consumers were expecting, providing them with features they wanted, rather than ones manufacturers thought they ‘needed’.

One constant battle that’s been fought within Apple’s camp at Cupertino is the adoption of Adobe Flash within their mobile devices. Apple has insisted that implementing flash would put undue pressure onto their phones internal processing, leading to a compromised user experience and severe effects on battery consumption. Android users on the other hand have been privy to downloading a compatible patch that would allow their devices access to Flash content.

Technology website ZDnet exclusively broke the news yesterday following their ‘intra quarter update’. The website was provided a statement saying:

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…We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Adobe then followed with a statement to partners announcing that they would be ‘stopping development on flash players for browsers on mobile’. Instead, they are believed to be focussing on providing customised applications for mobile and increasing their investment and development within HTML5 technologies. Android, Playbook and webOS users are believed to only receive security updates from this point onwards. Proving that the refusal from Apple to allow Flash to run on their devices was the death knell for the project as a whole.