Original blank gravestone image by Jo Naylor.
What were you doing the day Flash for Android died?
You probably won’t remember it a year from now. Or even six months from now. Today, Adobe removed Flash from Android’s Google Play store–and no one really cares.
The move comes after a very vocal brouhaha between Adobe and Apple over Apple’s decision to not support Flash on their iOS mobile devices. Steve Jobs claimed, in his manifesto on Flash, that this was because Flash drains battery life and had unpredictable behavior.
Now, years later, Flash is being pulled from the Google Play store today because it is unstable, drains battery life and has unpredictable behavior, as PC World details.
Instead, mobile browsing is ditching Flash for the venerable HTML5. Flash is currently no longer supported by Android, iOS, Symbian or Blackberry systems–and security updates for Android devices will only be provided until September 2013, as the BBC reports. Google’s mobile browser for Android and iOS devices also does not play Flash content, making Flash websites invisible to mobile users.
This is all something we have come to expect for many years now. Here at buuteeq, one of the very first videos we produced was on Flash and how incompatible it was with the mobile web. And yet still, some agencies are creating 2004-era Flash-based websites and mobile content for their clients, and charging 2012 prices. Instead, we encourage hotels to do their research and invest in HTML5 mobile content, as we detail in our infographic on mobile website design.
Bye-bye, Flash for Android. Pie.
About Brandon Dennis
Brandon is the Technical Marketing Manager at buuteeq, the digital marketing system for hotels. He manages buuteeq’s SEO, paid media channels, content creation, and the company blog. You can connect with him on Twitter @buuteeq.
