Why Flash failed on Android, and what it means for Adobe

I think this article gives Adobe too much credit, for example:

Virtually all the HTML5 video you’ve ever come across is just an embedded H.264 video in an MP4 wrapper. Phones are very good at decoding this kind of file without draining the battery. Flash could never compete with this kind of built-in performance.

Flash uses h264 (among other things) for video - there's no reason (that I'm aware of) that the flash runtime couldn't hook into the system library and run the video decode on the GPU.

Flash has always had great authoring tools, and some awesome API features (e.g. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cirrus/ - the tech behind chatroulette), but its performance has always sucked on every platform except Windows, which spells doom as Windows' relevance dwindles.

There's no fundamental reason for this - plenty of software manages to work well cross-platform. The cause of Flash's demise is a simple failure to execute, nothing more, nothing less. A valuable lesson for hackernews readers, perhaps. :-)

I guess I'm not clear on what makes it be considered by Adobe to be a failure. Not enough people are installing it? Those that are aren't using it? Not enough manufacturers/providers are bundling it with purchased devices? In other words: what changed between when they decided to work on making Flash for Android and this decision?

Flash didn't fail on android. Not that I used it all that much but when I did it worked great on my phone.

Very nice article.

Just a remark (which does not disagree with anything you've said):

Flash has not failed. The Flash Mobile Web Player has.

Air is still there and supported?

The flash player app is gone though