In what world is Flash 'dwindling in relevance'? Maybe the hyper progressive iphone-toting geek world but down here on planet earth, where we still browse the web with things called computers, Flash has massive leverage and I don't see it going anywhere for years.
And where do you see it going in some years? Do you see it becoming more important? Or is it a demonstrable fact that devices without Flash support have been highly successful in the market?
Apple sold 7 million iPhones last quarter, and a few million more iPod Touches. One of the primary features of these, for which they are often praised, is web browsing. None of them, not even jailbroken ones, support Flash. Many other devices in the market offer web browsing with Flash. They do not generally sell well, at least by comparison.
One conclusion you can draw from this is that there are 7 million more poor deluded fools out there who stupidly think it's possible to slink by on the web without the vital component of Flash. There will be much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments as these dreamers agonize over their diminished experience of the web, until that proud day in some distant future when they are finally blessed by their provider of their crippled devices with the privilege of Punching the Monkey any time they like. There will be load screens and gradients and tweening galore.
Another possible conclusion, which is the one I have drawn, is that these people are by and large satisfied with their purchases and consider the lack of Flash support a mild disappointment, if they consider it at all, on the occasion that they are blocked from some task (watching a video, playing a game, viewing an ad) because the author has chosen to limit its accessibility to Flash-supporting clients. And that this is a sign, perhaps, that Flash is really not so very vital to the experience of the web as is often supposed, being not so much a technical necessity as an inertial holdover from an earlier time--from back when you could honestly say that 99% of Web users had Flash. And further, that the popularity of devices that omit Flash support is not going to wane on that basis; more likely the opposite: that Flash itself is likely to slide into irrelevance as more people browse the web without it.
Hence: Flash is a legacy feature of dwindling relevance.
As it happens, I don't own an iPhone. I have only even used one for maybe 30 minutes, total. You may want to paint me as "hyper progressive" or swayed by owning the device, but my argument is based on what I see going on around me, right now, here on planet Earth.
In the coming years I do hope to see Flash die, but it's not going down without a fight, and it certainly still maintains a chokehold on almost the entire video delivery market which gives it massive leverage.
7 million iphones sold is great, but pales in comparison to how many pcs/macs are sold which come with full Flash support out of the box.
The poor iPhone users with no Flash support deal with it because they bought an Apple product and know 'the deal'. If you're going to buy Apple products you buy what they shit out, and complaining doesn't do a damn thing to sway Mr. Jobs and his crew. With any other provider the uproar over no Flash support would be deafening.
You're probably right, most iPhone users probably don't care so much about Flash support because they don't really have a choice and would rather have the good points of an iphone rather than ditch it just for that one feature (look how many stuck around with no MMS).
Flash blows, and I curse the day my clients discovered it but its not dieing, dwindling or fading .. yet.
That's last quarter alone, not counting iPods, not considering the potential of a new device, which presumably will also lack Flash. Also not counting any of the other mobile devices that support web browsing which also lack Flash, of which there are many.
It's not approaching total PC sales, but that's not the point. Flash-less devices don't need to outsell PCs in order to have an impact on them. It's a big number. It's a growing number. It's a number that represents the declining relevance of Flash, among other things. The point really isn't the devices themselves, but with the fact that people are using the web more and more without Flash, and Adobe has no foothold.
how many pcs/macs are sold which come with full Flash support
Which a growing number of users promptly disable. Consider that the most popular web browser plugins and extensions are for blocking ads, which incidentally means they block most of the Flash content on the web. To me, that suggests that if you can give users decent alternatives to the other core uses of Flash--the things they actually like, like video--they won't miss it. This was easier for Apple to do with the iPhone, but I'd say they did it successfully. It seems like only a matter of time on the desktop, which is why I say it's dwindling and not that "X will kill it".
The poor iPhone users with no Flash support deal with it because they bought an Apple product and know 'the deal'.
This is just a repeat of the incredibly naive and hackneyed idea that Apple is floating on die hard true believers, and not the same sea of average customers as everybody else. In point of fact, most of Apple's revenue in the past decade has come from people who use Windows and have no particular attachment to the brand. Not enough of one, anyway, to persuade them that something that really is important to them isn't.
No, more likely is that supposedly vital things like Flash support, MMS, and copy-and-paste (don't forget copy-and-paste!) are not actually important features to very many people at all. They may be desirable and appreciated, but in practice they don't make much difference as to whether people buy them or not.
I think you're right. Even when Adobe finally ships a modern Flash plugin for mobiles there are going to be some major usability issues. How do you deal with something like hovering on a touchscreen? or account for rendering properly on different size/resolution screens? It seems like we're going to reach the point quickly where trying to adapt Flash to work on a wide range of mobile devices isn't worth it.
