Adobe to stop development of Flash Player for mobile

In a shock move, Adobe has said that it plans to stop further development on the mobile version of its Flash Player.

In a leaked document sent to individuals “close to the matter” and published today by ZDNet, Adobe states that it will continue to support current versions of mobile Flash Player, but will now turn its focus to HTML 5 and embedded Flash and Air apps for mobile.

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.

It seems from this move that Adobe has admitted defeat in trying to push Flash content to mobile devices, and is resigned to the fact that HTML 5 is the way forward. This could even mean that it turns its attentions away from Flash on the desktop too, in order to invest more heavily on AIR and HTML 5 instead.

According to ZDNet, we can expect a detailed official announcement from Adobe today regarding the withdrawal of support for Flash on mobiles. We’ll post an update with a link to the news.