Written by Abhijit Kadle• November 10, 2011• 3:49 pm• Mobile Learning

Flash For Mobile Is Dead

HomeMobile LearningFlash For Mobile Is Dead

Recently Amit had written about how the eLearning industry and digital media in general has been driven to HTML5 by the rapid adoption of tablet computers, namely the iPad. To further reinforce that thought, Adobe announced just yesterday that it has ceased development on the Flash mobile browser plug-in. Meaning there will be no updates to those plug-ins and future versions of Android and Blackberry Playbooks may not be able to render Flash content.

As I see it, this brings up lots of questions. First, it seems Adobe is continuing development on the Flash plug-in and AIR runtime. So while they may have abandoned the mobile plug-in space, they may have something as a replacement up their sleeves, which should be interesting. Second, will the gradual movement towards web-browsing with mobile devices signal the end of the road for Flash as a platform? Will Adobe come out with something that is geared towards HTML5 authoring that completely replaces Flash for web animation and interaction.

What will a web without Flash look like? And what happens to the hundreds of casual game companies with games like ‘Farmville’ that are Flash based. The same goes for companies developing other media using Flash. Is this the beginning of a mass-migration of content, authoring environments and other tools to the HTML5 standard? Only time will tell, and we’ll be watching closely.

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About the Author / Abhijit Kadle

The 'Google' of Upside Learning, as he is fondly called, Abhijit plays a key role in guiding the Instructional Designers and is a chief member of the Innovation team. With over 15 years of professional experience in multimedia design and development, he has been active in the field of digital learning design for the past 12 years, and has worked on design driven projects for multimedia kiosk software, interactive CD–ROMs, multimedia instructional simulations, game-based learning environments, computer–based training, web–based training, and learning management systems and standards. He has managed multiple technical instructional design and development projects for various Fortune 500 companies at another eLearning company and also has presented learning sessions at various L&D events like mLearnCon, co-hosted webinars alongside leading industry experts, co-authored an eBook on Mobile Learning, and authored whitepapers on Mobile Learning and Game–based Learning. A Mechanical Engineer from the University of Pune, Abhijit is interested in multifarious subjects ranging from genetics, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, engineering, technology, computing to electronic games, media, communication, and the design of user experience and interaction.