Adobe appears to call the white flag on its mobile strategy. Unnamed sources are claiming that Adobe will announce soon that it will stop development in porting over the Flash Player on mobile devices and will focus on AIR.
According to ZDNet, their source said: “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.”
The company plans to continue to support the current Android and RIM’s PlayBook Flash Player support, but only in terms of bug fixes and security updates. It also plans to allow licensees of its source code to continue development on support Flash on mobile.
The company’s new plan seems to focus on AIR. AIR, or Adobe Integrated Runtime, allows developers to produce applications using Flash, HTML and Ajax, and allowing the application to run on many operating systems, including Windows and Mac OS X. Applications such as Tweetdeck are based on Adobe AIR.
Adobe AIR already supports Android and iOS, the two largest mobile OS platforms. However, Android developers typically use Java, while iOS developers tend to use Objective-C. And with everyone going mobile, and some choosing Windows Phone 7, Symbian, MeeGo, BlackBerry OS or (sadly) webOS, developers would need to either learn how to develop the same application under what programming language they support, or have a middleman to do the work. Adobe AIR could facilitate this, it just needs to support more platforms rather than just two.