Earlier this week, Adobe VP and General Manager Danny Winokur disclosed that the company has concluded that HTML5 is ”the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” The company said it would stop building Flash to run on mobile browsers. In a blog post on the new focus of Flash strategy, Winokur wrote:

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 continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

While Flash 12 work is said to be underway, many observers have wondered if this potentially marks the beginning of the end for Flash, which has been reeling since Apple refused to support it on iPhone and similar of its mobile devices.

Adobe’s Michael Chambers, principal product manager for developer relations, has responded to the general concern with a clarifying blog post, that includes a discussions of reasons for the move to quit the Flash-on-mobile-browser tact. In a post yesterday Chambers writes:

… given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops.

Also, it seems, the task of porting the plug in to innumerable mobile OSes and device types put a lot of pressure on Adobe development t efforts. ”For each new device, browser and operating system released, the resources required to develop, test and maintain the Flash Player also increases. This is something that we realized is simply not scalable or sustainable,” wrote Chambers.

Source: Ajaxian