Adobe stopping development of mobile flash

Adobe has somewhat surprised the tech world today by formally announcing that they will no longer push the development of mobile flash and instead focus their efforts on html5. This is a big change from adobe who were previously in constant fights with Apple over flash and html5. According to their press release they state:

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.  We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations.  We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Their focus now seems to be on development of html 5 support:

We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash.  Together they offer developers and content publishers great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences across PCs and devices.  There is already amazing work being done that is pushing the newest boundaries, and we can’t wait to see what is still yet to come!

It’s a bold move by Adobe and the impact on it on Android and BlackBerry devices is as of yet unknown. BlackBerry has it’s new OS (BBX) coming soon and it was to heavily rely on flash support but RIM have dramatically improved html5 support on it’s OS7 browser so the effect may not be too bad. It does appear now that HTML5 has won the war for mobile devices at least. Mobile flash is dead, long live html5!