Flash Mobile Dies Quietly - Or Does It? - As Adobe Kisses Apple's Ass

Copyright, Joseph Lackow 2011

An Adobe blog post today by Danny Winokur, VP & GM of Interactive development, included this little tidbit.

"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 continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook."

Why?  And for what, do they break the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill your technology without having a full replacement on tap?"

Universally supported HTML5, that's why.  But most developers will find that the current functionality of HTML5 is not on par with what you can do with Actionscript.  And it could hurt Flash, and its developers and their refined skillsets in general.

For future generations of premium video and gaming, that's for what.  Read: kissing Apple and iOS ass.  In the short term.

HOWEVER.  This represents real movement towards a standard based web.  Towards that end, how will this affect Microsoft plans for Silverlight?