Notice the title wasn’t Developers have little to say in the future of Flash. That’s because the only people really talking about Flash being in danger are the people who would love to see it go away: non-Flash developers. And boy are they talking.
I won’t bother to post links to all the great discussions on the topic since Apple introduced the iPad with what seems to be a lack of support for the Flash plug-in. I’m personally on the fence as Flash developer myself, but that’s not the topic of this post.
The sad truth is that we as developers don’t have much say at all in the tools that are chosen for web projects. I don’t know how many meetings I’ve been in where I’ve suggested minimizing flash elements and replacing them with CSS/Javascript but the end result is always the same. Compressed timelines and client expectations for pixel-perfect representations of the presented designs always lead to Flash.
“Flash will stick around because it’s the tool of choice for multimedia artists, illustrators, animators, and graphic designers. Not everyone is a coder.”
This is the comment by Carlos Nazareno from a great discussion on the topic that really got me thinking about why Flash has stuck around for so long.
The huge advertising agencies of the world have and will continue to keep flash alive in rich media advertising and promotional microsites. This is not a statement about the capabilities of HTML5/JS/CSS versus Flash, it’s more a comment on the fact that the technology decisions in these agencies are dictated by creatives not developers.
Big advertising is married to Flash because of browser consistency and motion graphics-style capabilities. Creatives are dictating how this work is being produced and the vast majority of them don’t even know what HTML5 is. If developers were making these decisions it would be a different story and the sites winning awards would be actually utilizing bleeding-edge technology.
And it’s not just the decisions of creatives, Apple, Adobe or Google that will choose the fate of Flash. Think about every corporation that has invested millions into their flash-based projects such as Club Penguin, McWorld, ClubBK or Farmville. Or the enormous market for rich media banner advertising. Does anyone really think these folks are going to change what they’re doing because it doesn’t show up on an iPad? For many of these multi-player gaming sites there actually is no alternative to Flash available. Will Disney shut down Club Penguin because it’s not supported on an iPad? I don’t think so.
Apple is playing a bit of a dangerous game of chicken here. Consumers will blame the hardware first for any shortcomings. An average user who visits their favorite Flash-based website will sooner blame the iPad for “not working”. But I that’s a topic for another blog post…
For me, as a Flash developer myself I actually would love to see this turn of events make a major change in Adobe’s strategy for interactive web technologies. Maybe Adobe will make a push to support a standards-based platform that doesn’t require a browser plug-in to replace Flash. I would love to see it. But as long as “Big Advertising” continues to buy volume licenses of the Flash IDE en masse and their employees continue to push it on the large corporations of the world, Adobe has little motivation to do anything of the sort and Flash will continue to live on whether we (as developers) like it or not.