In what some are calling a win for Apple, Adobe announced its new Flash Media Server 4.5 Thursday, which will repackage flash content automatically for iOS mobile devices that currently lack support for the media format.
To be clear, the news doesn’t mean Flash is directly supported on iOS devices. It does mean that the media server will be able to export Flash content as HTML5, which eventually will be supported on iOS when web publishers use the new Adobe software.
In the past, Apple refused to enable support for Flash because it consumed far too much of the device’s resources, causing the device to run poorly and draining its battery power faster. Adobe’s new fix changes this by allowing Flash developers to continue writing in Flash while automating the process of converting those Flash assets into a format Apple’s mobile devices can read.
The news marks a crucial acknowledgement by Adobe that it needed to change its strategy with Flash to remain relevant in a world that is increasingly turning to mobile.
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