Adobe has instructed developers that it is stopping development of the flash player for mobile devices.  In an email briefing to Adobe's partners, they announced the following:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

Focus will instead shift to developing Adobe AIR runtime to better support flash applications on mobile platforms, and greater investment in HTML technologies.

Some have used this announcement to argue that Steve Jobs was right to abandon Flash support in Apple Devices. As I see it, it is the fact that flash is blocked on one of the major mobile platforms that has forced Adobe into a different strategy. If Apple has not railed against flash, then it is likely that Adobe would be continuing to support a mobile browser based plug in.

Is this the beginning of the end for flash - or even the end of the beginning? I can't say, but from personal experience, I have'nt been asked to make any flash based browser apps for a long time. Browsers have reached the point where most non complext animation tasks that would have been handled by flash in the past, are now using jquery or html 5.

There is one important area where flash is still a vital tool and that's web video. If you are thinking of creating an embedded video in a webpage, it's a real pain trying to make it work across the top 3 browsers. Developing video for mobiles is even more of a minefield. Whereas with flash, if you have the player, then you can make streaming video work in nearly every desktop browser. Now wtih mobile flash all but dead, you can no longer use a flash video with fallback to iphone video. It's just a shame that HTML5 video is not standard across all browsers.