Topic: Adobe announces end of mobile Flash development

Hi All,

Just curious what Adobe's announcement today means for Chumby developers and the Chumby platform going forward. Chumbians, any thoughts?

Re: Adobe announces end of mobile Flash development

Well, the only thing it affects in the long run is our "chumby lite" Android application, since it relies on the mobile Flash Player plugin, though they do say they're going to support bug and security fixes, etc., and they're not talking about removing the plugin from Market altogether.  I presume also that "bug fixes" would include compatibility with future versions of Android.  It sounds like they won't be adding new features - that doesn't really affect our apps at this point since it already supports everything that our apps can do.

We're currently a source code licensee for Flash - so we're the type of people they're talking about with they talk about "source code licensees will be able to continue working on and releasing their own implementations".

On the other hand, this does seem to send some sort message with regard to Flash's long term future, though a somewhat ambiguous one given their recent extensive enhancements to the desktop plugin (support for hardware 3D etc).

Frankly, it's hard to see HTML5 as a viable replacement for Flash on a mobile device - most game developers I've heard from say it's a real pain to make stuff happen *exactly* when you want it to, there are no standard video and audio codecs that are supported across all devices and browsers, etc., which means that most are building native apps instead.

AIR and Mobile AIR seem to have survived the purge, so maybe that's the future.

Re: Adobe announces end of mobile Flash development

Here's a very interesting article discussing the issues around games development, comparing Flash, HTML5 and Unity, in the context of Adobe's announcements.

Re: Adobe announces end of mobile Flash development

I was just at the New Game Conference in SF last week... the scope of what can be done with SVG, Canvas, WebGL, and JavaScript is getting really good.  I don't think it's as all-together as Flash -- performance varies among the implementations and the complexity can be higher.  However, it's coming along, and I think the tooling to give a Flash-like dev experience for HTML5 content will be there soon.

Still, it's sad to see Adobe back off from this space.  I really think a lot of people gave Flash a bad rap.