Steve Jobs was right about his “Thoughts on Flash”

Adobe has officially decided to discontinue development of future versions of Flash for mobile devices. The news comes about a year and a half after Steve Jobs wrote an open letter called “Thoughts on Flash.” In the letter Jobs gave his thoughts on the use of Flash in mobile devices and explained why Apple would not support Flash on their mobile devices.

In a statement to developers, Adobe wrote:

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.

Adobes decision to discontinue Flash for mobile devices makes it appear that Steve Jobs was correct. Due to the poor performance and reduced battery life Flash causes on mobile devices, Apple elected to not use it on the iPhone or iPad. Jobs believed that Flash is outdated technology and on it’s way out.

Today makes it clear the whole world is moving to HTML5 and since Flash for mobile devices never evolved into a stable plugin, the smart thing to do is discontinue it.

Tablets that use Flash will likely have to drop their support for Flash or build their own plug-in if they want a working version of Flash on future devices.

Steve Jobs also explained his “Thoughts on Flash” in this video at the D8 conference video in July of 2010.

Originally posted 2011-11-09 22:27:31.