Don't get AIR and gone in a Flash. And Silverlight was only a sparkle?

So much for Android's 'full Web experience'

By Jon Tullett, Editor: News analysis
Johannesburg, 20 Aug 2012

Adobe Flash is officially no longer available for Android devices. This raises a tough question for Web developers: whether to support Flash at all, and how to migrate a Flash investment for the next-generation of Web users.

At the end of last week, Adobe quietly removed the Flash player from Google's Play store, following through on its announcement last year that development would cease. Although current users will still have access to Flash, new devices will not.


With no support for Apple's iOS, that means 85% of the smartphone market (68% of which is Android) and 97% of the tablet market is out of reach for Flash developers. That is a complete reversal from days when a Flash developer could safely assume near ubiquitous access: over 95% of desktop users had a Flash-capable Web browser.

Users who already have Flash loaded on their Android devices will still be able to use it, and Adobe has promised updates for another year. And although it's gone from the Play store, users, even of new Android 4.1 devices, can sideload Flashif they need to.

Was Steve right?

Flash has never been available for iOS devices, including iPhones and iPads. Steve Jobs publicly criticised Flash for performance, security and reliability shortcomings, and (perhaps ironically) noted concerns with locking users into a proprietary platform. Flash, Jobs declared, was not welcome on iOS.

With the mobile Web denied to them, developers have needed to develop alternative solutions for mobile users, and turned to JavaScript, HTML5, H.264 video, and other options. That raised an uncomfortable overhead of supporting legacy Flash code for one user-base, and a separate mobile codebase for others.

Platform support is already a challenge for mobile app developers looking to reach a wide audience, with separate versions needed for iOS, Android (and sometimes different versions of Android), BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

Flash, like Java, was supposed to offer write once, run anywhere computing via Web browsers, and for a while it did just that. Now, HTML5 is stepping in, providing an alternative to Flash, and to native mobile apps. HTML5 promises ubiquitous cross-platform support, native apps offer advanced features, tight device integration and app store support. Rich Web app frameworks like Flash and Silverlight are supposed to sit between the two, but have been squeezed into irrelevance.

Flash down

Web developers have responded by moving away from Flash. Since last year, Flash usage on Web sites has declined from 27% to 23%, according to W3Techs. In comparison: Microsoft's Silverlight barely moves the needle with deployment of 0.3%, just above Java's 0.2%. JavaScript is used by over 92% of sites. HTML5 is reportedly in active use on 34% of the top 100 Web sites.

In the post-Flash era, Adobe is hoping developers and users will adopt the Adobe AIR (“Adobe Integrated Runtime”) format, which extends many of the core Flash technologies in a cross-platform framework for deploying Web applications. AIR is available for Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows, OSX, and Linux.

However, like Microsoft's Silverlight, the market momentum is against AIR. There are increasingly popular alternatives (HTML5 et al), and those alternatives will be ubiquitously available to users where AIR and Silverlight require separate additional application downloads.

The vendors are not blind to this: Microsoft and Adobe are both embracing HTML5 and related Web technologies, and offering tools to develop and deploy applications.

What now for the Web?

For organisations with heavy investments in Flash, this could mean an extensive, and expensive, overhaul.

In particular, high-profile video sites including YouTube and Vimeo offer videos in an HTML5 frontend, using video technologies such as H.264 or WebM. Game producers like Zynga, with its portfolio of Flash games targeting Facebook users, need to consider redevelopment looming in order to successfully embrace the mobile Web (Zynga is indeed investing in HTML5).

Flash may have been criticised for security flaws and performance issues, but it has been delivering rich Web applications for over 15 years. As the Web goes mobile, that era is drawing to a close.