Adobe gives up mobile Flash

Adobe today:

We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations

Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash, April 2010

New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Adobe gives up mobile Flash

It turns out a few days ago Adobe updated its Photoshop.com Mobile app for iOS and renamed it as Photoshop Express, which made a lot more sense and a lot less mouthful.

Many of you might not know this but Adobe used to run a web project called Photoshop Express about two years ago on the domain photoshop.com. It was designed to be a free and light photo editing web app. They’ve since launched it properly and added links to other services such as Flickr and Facebook but dropped the Express name.

For whatever reason, they’ve now repurposed the name for the iOS app and added iPad compatibility. While the app itself is pretty neat for a light editing app, it’s kind of stupid how you can only launch it in portrait orientation. If you launch the app on the iPad while holding it horizontally, the app will quit and hand over whatever file it was going to open to a random app.