Adobe's announcement last week that it will no longer develop the Flash Player for mobile devices came as a shock for many. At that time, Adobe said it will release one final version of the Flash Player for Android and the BlackBerry PlayBook, which shipped last Friday as version 11.1. Trying to allay concerns over the abrupt change in direction, Danny Winokur, who is the senior director of business development in Adobe's Platform Business Unit wrote: "We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations." 

Unfortunately, Adobe has not committed to any time frame or said how long it intends to continue patching security bugs in the flash player software. This is problematic given the consistently large number of critical vulnerabilities found in Flash. Against the backdrop of state-sponsored hackers with a proven knack for exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, any cessation of security updates effectively means that Flash is dead in the water for businesses and security-conscious users.

So how does Adobe's decision about Flash affect tablet and smartphone makers? Probably not at all in the short term. As observed by eWeek, Flash continues to be mentioned on the websites of Android tablet makers and should remain a "competitive differentiator" for now. And it's business as usual at RIM, which posted a statement: "As an Adobe source-code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our own implementations, and are looking forward to including Flash 11.1 for the BlackBerry PlayBook."

For more on this story:
- check out this article at PCWorld
- check out this article at eWeek
- check out this article at the Adobe Flash blog

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