Adobe Flash Player and its future

Adobe Flash Player

Flash is travelled very long distance in last decade, from Macromedia Flash to Adobe Flash. This Flash word is always in tech buzz. Initially it was popular in animator group then gradually attracted the attention of application developers and became a de-facto for RIA applications.

Flash is always preferable for developing richest content and deployed on browser. This enables consistent look and feel across different browser wherever Flash Player installed. Last year Flash was rejected by Apple’s for their devices and Apple started advocating open source technologies HTML5. This incident started a new thread in tech community over Flash existence.  Now again the same buzz started on Flash and its future after the Adobe’s recent announcement that they will no longer develop the Flash player for mobile browsers. In tech history there were several popular technology rolled out and rolled back depends on market movement, like JavaFX, SilverLight etc. Every technology has their lifecycle and this is manipulated by technology deviations.

Now we are entered in handheld device from desktop era. Here in this era everyone is looking for application migration for handheld devices. Here now if anything happens related to mobile or handheld devices then there is big news, but last year Adobe also stopped future development for Linux based AIR then there was silence.

Compare to Flash Player currently HTML5 is now supported on all major mobile devices. HTML5 is now a preferable technology for browser based application on mobile devices. With the latest release of Flash Player 11.1 for mobile browser Adobe will not support further for Flash player of mobile browser. This version of Flash player is still a very advance and powerful, there is still a scope of development Flash based application for mobile browser by taking advantage of new Flash Player 11.1 features.

As per market trends most of the customer want to port there application as a mobile devices apps, not as a browser based application. Here in this segment Flash is still a key player and we can port our Flash based application on Mobile device using AIR. Good news Adobe is still working on Flash Player 12 version so there is no point of worry.HTML5 is a very good technology but it still need time to fulfil the entire RIA requirement. Video/Media content delivery model is still not consistent in HTML5. Here Flash Player is best solution.

I am waiting for the day when Flash Player become an open source product and managed by some open source community. Then after we can say that we as Flash developers are using non-proprietary technology like HTML5. In this area Adobe has already taken initiative by planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation.  This step will really give a high momentum in Flex SDK area.

Flash journey start from FutureWave to Macromedia and from Macromedia to Adobe, now Flash is ready to open source community in future. There is one thing for sure wherever Flash will go it will rock, it will not going to die soon like others.