The Future of Flash Part – 2

Apple’s influence is such that several websites such as YouTube, CNN, Vimeo, Reuters, Time, the New York Times, ESPN and more have converted content on their website to be streamed through HTML5. This along with Microsoft announcing HTML5 integration within its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 would seem to point to a future where Flash’s ubiquity will be less pronounced. Despite being squeezed out of the world’s most successful and lucrative mobile platform there are other encouraging signs for Flash. Android keeps growing in leaps and bounds, RIM is still growing, Samsung is releasing the Bada OS, Nokia and Intel have teamed up to launch the MeeGo OS, and Windows Mobile has been revamped as Windows 7 already boasting exciting handsets such as the Dell Lightning due to come out. Flash plug-ins can already be installed in jailbroken iPhones which even have a dedicated App Store in Cydia where developers can sell their apps. Upcoming tablet devices such as the HP Slate, the Dell Streak and the WePad all boast flash compatibility.

Perhaps another way for Adobe to counter is by (drum roll please!) emulating Apple! By this I am referring to the open source Webkit project which started out as Apple proprietary technology but is now being used by Nokia, Google, RIM, Palm, the KDE Project and more. Surely, if Adobe were to make Flash open source and also allowed other developers to improve the code, Apple’s major arguments against Flash would be shot down. The first being that Flash is a proprietary technology would no longer be valid and the second that it crashes often would be tackled by numerous developers who would then adopt and improve the then open source code.

HTML5 has to power to effectively render Flash redundant as far as the web is concerned but it is still a couple years away from mass adoption. What Apple is effectively trying to do is to hasten this. Websites such as YouTube are already in the process of making all of its videos available in the .H264 codec mainly to allow iPhone (and now iPad, too) users to use their website. In addition to numerous others that are “iPad ready” we can see a sort of conditioning at work that will no doubt have Adobe, a company that has long shared a symbiotic relationship with Apple, worried for the future. The way I see it is that they can continue as they are right now by betting big on systems like Android or they could, by going the open source route, make Flash even more entrenched while its ubiquity is still dominant. Perhaps then Apple would have to yield and allow not only for Flash to be used to code apps for the iPhone but also allowing Flash itself to be on the iPhone.