In case you missed it Adobe mentioned back in November that they are killing development of Mobile Flash, but they will continue to develop Flash for the desktop. 2014 is the year when mobile search will overtake desktop search in terms of shear numbers of searches performed; it seems hard to believe that Adobe isn’t planning on killing Flash as we know it all together.
Adobe is dumping Mobile Flash support in favor of HTML5 and the writing is on the wall. They will keep releasing new versions of Flash Player. Adobe’s Flash application will live on to allow continued creation of Apps published to Adobe’s Air platform for use on Android, iOS as well as other mobile platforms. Thus Flash will become a predominately desktop and application publication tool.
So, it is probably time to reassess your website and switch over to an HTML5 based solution (if you’re currently implementing Flash) or you might end up losing a lot of the increased mobile search in the coming years.
HTML5 is an open standard, and many are hailing this switch as victory for open source/open standards over a privately controlled standard (Adobe Flash). As someone who has to routinely deliver web content for clients, I can tell you that there are some definite perks about Flash that I will sorely miss.
Flash is consistent; I can design a solution for our website or a client and it works consistently if the end user has a current version of Flash Player installed. Now instead of this nice fairly streamlined solution you have HTML5 for video. This requires 2 different video formats for your video to play in a variety of desktop browsers, plus mobile browsing issues; this is a big head ache.
Instead of being able to expect a very consistent implementation of Flash, you’ll have to constantly be monitoring how 5 or more different browsers are changing the way they deal with HTML5 video and fixing these issues constantly.
This will hopefully improve as we transition to HTML5 in the next few years, but the interim will be painful. You can check out more information directly from Adobe below.
“Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5 Adobe Featured Blogs”