Adobe announced this week that it will no longer develop a mobile version of its Flash program. In a statement released by Adobe they said,
Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.
Joshua Benton, at Nieman Journalism Lab, wrote a post about what this means for news organizations. He said that the lack of a mobile Flash player impacts the video, interactive graphics and advertisements on news websites. The technology will still work on computers, but mobile devices won’t have the same options for displaying the media. The announcement will help push news organizations to adapt to HTML5, if they haven’t started already, but could hinder the sharing and displaying of content that’s already in the Flash format.