Steve Jobs’ Final Victory: Adobe Abandons Flash on Mobile

November 11th, 2011 by Trefis Team
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Adobe (NASDAQ:ADBE) has announced that it will be ceasing all future development on Flash Player for new mobile devices. [1] Flash has been the dominant technology for creating interactive and animated content on all major computer platforms, and has also been available on most smartphone platforms. However, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) chose not to support Flash on its iOS devices including the iPad and the iPhone. Steve Jobs even penned a long missive lambasting Flash last year. [2] Even Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) recently announced that it wouldn’t include Flash support in the Metro interface in Windows 8, which is aimed at tablets. Even though Flash has been available on Google‘s (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android and Nokia‘s (NYSE:NOK) Symbian – two of the largest mobile platforms – its performance has never been up to the mark. There have always been two areas where Flash has failed on mobile – performance and battery life.

Adobe doesn’t directly generate any significant revenues from Flash, but development tools for Flash, as part of Adobe’s Creative Software, account for a major portion of Adobe’s revenues. According to our estimates, Flash for Mobile Phones accounts for less than 1% of the $35 Trefis price estimate for Adobe, but Creative Software accounts for more than 50%.

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Adobe Officially Shifts Focus to HTML 5

Adobe has already been developing various tools for creating interactive animated content using HTML 5, like Adobe Edge. It also recently acquired PhoneGap, an app development platform which allows you to build cross platform mobile apps easily using web technologies like HTML 5 and JavaScript.

We expect Adobe’s new HTML 5 publishing tools to account for a larger part of Adobe’s Creative Software revenues in the coming years, compensating any fall in the sales of Flash development tools. As for Flash, Adobe has announced that it will still continue to work on Flash for PCs, and offer tools to Flash developers so that they can package native platform apps using Adobe AIR.

Even though we don’t expect this move to affect Adobe’s Trefis price estimate significantly, it does drive home the point that Steve Jobs was right about Flash all along.

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Notes:
  1. Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5, Press Release [↩]
  2. Thoughts on Flash, Apple [↩]