Adobe Flash Platform developer Cooperation Department Head Product Manager: Why do you give up mobile flash

Introduction: The final news in the web app field this month is Adobe's announcement that it has abandoned the development of Flash players based on mobile browsers. The technical circles have all discussed this and all think it is the victory of HTML5 technology, adobe Flash Platform developer Cooperation Department Head product manager Mike
Chambers published a long blog post to explain the incident, clarify some misunderstandings, and reveal the reasons behind this strategic change from a technical perspective. Many news articles have been summarized on the Internet. The full text is translated as follows:

I have worked for FLASH products and some community relationships for about 12 or 13 years (more than 10 years in Macromedia and Adobe ). During this period, we experienced many ups and downs. The past few days should be the hardest time I have spent in my career. I would like to use the following blog to clarify the news over the past few days and to announce the future development of the Flash Platform.

First, reiterate Adobe's statement a few days ago:

1. Around the Flash Platform, we will focus on: 1) Adobe AIR development solutions for mobile applications. 2) display rich content such as games and videos on a desktop browser based on Flash Player.

2. a large amount of resources will be invested in HTML5 in the future, including money and manpower, including tools, solutions, and browsers.

3. Flash players on mobile browsers will no longer be developed.

The last point is undoubtedly the most important, which leads to a lot of confusion and speculation, and other information is concealed. This situation is understandable considering the popularity of Flash Player on many devices. However, this also reflects the reasons for this strategic switch. We have not communicated well with the developer community. I can imagine how frustrated the flash community is. I am sorry here. We clearly express our goals, that is, what we want to do, but we have not paid enough attention to explaining to the outside world why.

Therefore, please tolerate the following long article. I will explain the reasons for doing so and discuss the role of flash on the Web (especially the relationship with HTML5 ).

First, we need to make it clear that we will continue to promote the mobile Adobe AIR technology, and a number of successful applications based on Adobe AIR technology have emerged. We only stopped Flash Player Plug-in development on mobile browsers. We will continue to provide important bug fixes and security updates on the current device, and the existing flash will continue to work. At the same time, we will continue to invest in HTML5 technology. Today, I will not talk about it more specifically, but it can basically be understood that we will switch some resources on the Flash Platform to HTML5.

This decision is part of Adobe's overall strategy, including better turning to HTML5 and Adobe Creative cloud. This strategy will be detailed in my blog post. You can also learn it through analyst observation (summary, video) a few days ago.

Why Does Adobe decide not to develop flash plug-ins on mobile browsers?

Taking into account the policy responsibilities that will be brought about, this decision is not easy. However, in the end, we found that many factors clearly indicated that continuing to invest resources in mobile browser flash is not a good choice. Flash will not be successfully overwritten on a PC desktop on a mobile device. This is obvious because of the split nature of the Mobile electronics market, and one of the leading platforms (Apple's iOS) that do not allow flash to run on its browser, flash player does not want to be ubiquitous on the PC end, full coverage. The obvious fact is that no matter how hard we work, flash player will not run on the iOS platform in the visible future.

HTML5 popularity in Mobile browsers

As mentioned above, HTML5 is highly supported by smartphones and tablets, especially on mobile devices. Its popularity is similar to that of Flash Player. Although its cross-platform performance and tools are not yet excellent and stable, the continuous update speed is very fast (just look at ios4 to 5, canvas performance improvement ). The new generation of smartphones and tablets (starting with the iPhone) have only developed for a few years, so the Software deployed on them is as novel and advanced, resulting in, now you don't have to deal with the old browser.

Like Flash Player, Which is ubiquitous on the desktop and has a high penetration rate on mobile devices and HTML5, it is also the best technology for developing and deploying rich content across mobile platforms. We tried to make Flash Player popular on mobile terminals, but we finally found that this expectation would not be realized.

Differences in users' consumption habits when using rich content on the desktop and mobile terminals

On the desktop end, users obtain rich content in browsers and client software, but on the Mobile End, users seem to be the only option to choose client applications. The closely integrated OS layer and app store on the mobile platform makes it very convenient for users to discover new content and applications, instead of searching through the Web.

This result is produced for several reasons:

·Differences in screen sizes, solutions, and interaction modes between PC desktops and mobile devices

·Generally, slow and high-latency network access speeds make it very expensive and less likely for users to download rich clients from the web.

·The close integration of client applications with the OS layer.

·The highly integrated App Store and OS make it easy and smooth to discover new content.

When users play games on mobile devices, they will immediately switch to the App Store to find the game and download and install it easily. It is important that users' preferences make Flash Player unnecessary on PC Desktop.

Extensibility of plug-ins for mobile browsers

When developing Flash Player Plug-ins on mobile browsers, we found that we needed to use resources far beyond our imagination. Compared with the desktop end, we can have a well-defined browser, APIs, at the same time, we work closely with several major browser vendors. In general, we can use the existing APIs to complete the vast majority of development work. However, on the mobile end, we also need to work with engineers from other companies at multiple levels:

·Mobile operating system providers (such as Google and rim)

·Hardware manufacturers (such as Motorola and Samsung)

·Component Manufacturers (such as NVIDIA)

Although we have a good relationship with these vendors, we also need to invest a certain amount of resources for each OS, hardware, and component, and on each device, when the new browser and OS versions are released, both development, testing, and maintenance are required to ensure the improvement of Flash Player, which makes us realize that it is unlikely to guarantee the scalability and continuity of Flash Player.

I have seen some people ask why Adobe AIR has different fate? There are several reasons why Adobe AIR requires a lot of resources to be invested in development, including the well-defined APIs to be matched and the differences between browsers and versions are not considered. In the final analysis, developers have used Adobe AIR to develop successful applications, so we decided to continue to invest in them.

Some resources are switched from flash to HTML5

Finally, considering the expansion of HTML5 in mobile and desktop browsers, we decided to allocate our resource balance to flash and HTML5. New HTML5 Development (tools, frameworks, browsers, etc.) resources are obtained by stopping the development of Flash Player for mobile browsers.

I understand that not everyone agrees with the conclusion above, but combined with the increasing complexity and resource consumption faced by Flash Player for mobile browsers, we believe that these inputs are not the best way to use them.

What does this strategic transfer mean for the entire Flash Platform?

Giving up developing Flash Player for mobile browsers is indeed frustrating for many developers. We also see whether their concerns and confusions will affect the entire Flash Platform and whether we will continue to push it forward? Do we need to stop developing the flash player on the PC desktop? Will flash die? It is clarified here that, contrary to some people's propaganda, flash will not die, but the role and focus will be shifted, and we will continue to play an important role on the Web and mobile terminals.

Adobe AIR

We will continue to invest in the development of Adobe AIR in desktop and mobile equipment vendors. We have seen that the use of Adobe AIR to develop mobile applications has been widely accepted, and a large number of Adobe AIR-based applications have emerged, some examples include machinarium and watch.
ESPN and my favorite tweet hunt.

Flash Player on PC Desktop

We feel that flash will continue to play a key role in PC web, especially in promoting new webfeatures and functions. Therefore, we will invest in it for a long time and are developing the next version of Flash Player. Of course, with the increasing support of HTML5 by browsers, the role of Flash has also changed. We believe that in the visible future, flash will focus on distributing high-end video processing and a strong view of rich game platforms.

Some of these features already exist in the current Flash Player:

·Support for mouse lock

·ActionScript workers/concurrent APIs

·Support telemetry/monocle

·Audio API improvement, especially for better processing of Low-latency audio

·New data types in ActionScript 3

We have also made a long and important change to the architecture, which will make the Flash Player developer a profit in the coming year. We are still in the early stages and will announce more information in a few months.

Adobe Flex

I have also received many questions about Adobe Flex, which will be explained in a single article.

PS: notes from the flex team.

Flash Professional Edition

I have discussed an article yesterday. I am still working on the Flash Professional Edition of the next version, and have invested in development support for a long time.

HTML5 and flash

Finally, I would like to talk about the development of HTML5 and flash.

At the beginning of flash, its main role was to make things run on the web, and there were no other solutions at the time. Due to the popularity and widespread use of flash, and as the leader, new features such as animation, vector graphics, sound, video, camera and microphone have been applied in the history of Flash development, it is constantly applied to the Web.

During this period, some flash features were added to the browser, but some new features will soon appear in the browser after flash was first launched, while Flash will continue to launch new features, so many times, thus forming a virtuous circle. This cycle is expected to continue later, so that users (who want to get rich content as soon as possible), Adobe (who want to sell related technologies and tools), and browser developers (who want to pay attention to the Flash features available) benefits from both parties.

The key point is that if Flash features are successful, they will eventually be integrated by browsers, and developers and users will increasingly access them through Browsers rather than flash.

Later, with the rapid development of HTML5 features added to the browser, we were facing new competition in the browser market, the possibility of many things has changed dramatically (some overlapping features of both sides were originally exclusive to Flash Player ). Although HTML5/css3 has grown to be as popular as Flash Player, the trend has become very obvious. More and more things you can do in the past only through flash. Now HTML5 and css3 can be used in browsers.

I think this is very important, so I will repeat it again. In the past, what we did on the Flash Platform will gradually develop directly on the browser using HTML5 and css3.

I know that developers who use flash for their technical career may be a little scared and I fully understand it. But for the flash community, this change will also bring huge opportunities, the more browsers support rich content and dynamic images, the more experienced designers and developers in related fields. The Flash community is the only group that has done similar work in the past decade. It is no coincidence that some of the most popular HTML5 features have been implemented by flash in the past.

I don't think that all Flash content will be implemented using HTML5. You need to decide based on the development resources, target platform, and user experience of the project, your customers will require HTML5, And you should adjust your technical development according to their needs.

This article is longer than I expected, but I want to share some of my thoughts over the past few days. I understand it and apologize for being discouraged by the elderly in the community. We will improve our community communication and make it as clear as possible to express flash-related developments and ideas.

Source: mikechambers

Source: webapptrend