Quote Originally Posted by david petley View Post
I was unaware of this until recently, but I guess one really crucial issue for this discussion is that Adobe will no longer be developing the flash player for mobile devices following the release of flash player 11.1 for Android and Blackberry. See http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations...ash-focus.html
However, they are continuing support past that for AIR on mobile. As mentioned, the future of interactivity on mobile devices is in apps. Not in browsing with Firefox on tiny screens, trying to click on hypertext links with a thumb measuring 10 times the text height.

That said, I still think it's a bad move by Adobe. Adobe's decisions don't necessarily reflect sound ones from a technology/development perspective.

Quote Originally Posted by david petley View Post
Whatever the reasons, no more mobile flash player development is a pretty important issue when it comes to the op's thread title - ...seems like, for all but high end tablets using x86 architecture and running Windows OS for PCs (like the Samsung Slate series 7), HTML5 will have to be a replacement for FLASH.
No. Because many other devices support AIR.

Besides, from a developers perspective, the OPs statement could stand, even if changes in the industry do not reflect it. I don't contend that Flash has taken a significant hit. I contend that it shouldn't have.

In my view, it means that the advancement of interactive technology is being dictated by forces that lack understanding of the underlying technologies. It has become a marketing tug-of-war at the expense of quality, cost and efficiency.