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Apple wants to kill Adobe Flash

As the world awaits the imminent release of Apples Ipad we can’t help but wonder about all those people trying to view flash based websites or flash banners on some of the most viewed websites in the world. Google Analytics uses flash to render its charts, New York Time, Yahoo, CNN and countless other websites sell flash banners as part of their revenue stream. So what’s going to happen ?

While at Soldia we embrace all front end technologies, we can’t help but feel that Adobe Flash usage will drop considerably and we will as much as possible try to steer clients away from this technology if possible.

Steve Jobs claims about flash are quite valid:

Flash is a CPU hog and drains the battery quickly
Flash is a non standard compliant and proprietary plugin
Flash content is not indexed well by search engines and as a result not great for businesses that rely on SEO
Flash has been plagued with multiple viruses

But most importantly Steve Jobs has not mentioned one important aspect of flash. That if he was to allow it on apple mobile devices, it could compete strongly with the Itune Stores and cost Apple a big chunk of revenues in the long term.

Personally, we think the first 3 reasons are enough to steer away from Flash if possible. Even with the multitude of other ‘Tablet’ devices from HP, Dell, Sony, etc the CPU usage and battery draining will push users to avoid Flash. From the point of view of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Flash has not fared well either, so businesses will more than likely steer away from Flash also and opt for more standardized techniques like JQuery for animation on their websites.

As for those lovely banners that generate revenues on our favorite websites, they will just have to have a backup image for visitors without the Flash plugin.

The future of flash is far from decided and this year being the ‘Year of the Tablet’ will be very interesting indeed.