Adobe to abandon work on mobile Flash

Adobe Systems has abandoned future development of its Flash player for mobile devices in what amounts to a posthumous recognition of the software’s condemnation by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Adobe shares fell as much as 14 per cent on Wednesday, with the Flash announcement part of a wider restructuring announced by the company to focus on its digital media and digital marketing businesses, which it said were “explosive growth categories”.

The Silicon Valley company said about 750 jobs would be lost, or about 7 per cent of its workforce, and revenue growth over the next year would be reduced by 4 to 5 percentage points as investment was reduced and licence sales fell in certain enterprise products that were no longer a focus.

Adobe’s Flash player has been dominant on the PC for the rendering of videos, games and ads, but its attempts to introduce it on another exploding category – mobile devices – have been fraught with delays and poor performance.

It earned the opprobrium of Steve Jobs, its most vocal critic, who did not allow its use on the Safari browser for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

In a tirade against Flash on Apple’s website last year, Mr Jobs described it as unreliable, insecure and battery-draining on the iPhone. He said Flash was a proprietary technology and Apple preferred an open set of web standards known as HTML5.

In a blog note on Wednesday, Danny Winokur, Adobe’s head of interactive development, said HTML5 was now universally supported on major mobile devices and Flash Player would no longer be developed beyond an upcoming 11.1 release for Android devices and the BlackBerry Playbook.

Analysts welcomed the move. Al Hilwa at the IDC research firm described it as “a wise adjustment in the face of changing web standards”.

“HTML5 is coming on strong ... having an enormous cadre of staff working on putting Flash on every hardware on the planet appears to be unnecessary when an alternative solution can leverage a broader developer ecosystem,” he said.

Adobe makes money from selling developers software tools to create in Flash, rather than from the Flash player itself. It has recently introduced HTML5 creation tools with its Edge product and their incorporation in its Creative Suite software.

The company did not specify which enterprise products would become less of a focus and was expected to reveal more about its new strategy at its financial analysts’ day on Wednesday. It did say it would try to extend its leadership in document services with its Acrobat product line.

Adobe shares recovered some of their early weakness and were 7.2 per cent lower at $28.23 in early afternoon trading in New York on Wednesday.