There is a lot of exciting news for the Flash Platform community coming out of Barcelona, Spain at the Mobile World Congress.
Firstly, Adobe has announced that Flash Player 10.1 is coming for almost all mobile operating systems including Android, the BlackBerry® platform, Symbian® OS, Palm® webOS and Windows Mobile®. Flash Player 10.1 is the first version of the Flash Player released through the cooperation of over 70 organizations including 19 of the 20 top mobile providers through the Open Screen Project.
View an excerpt from the Google Keynote:
It was also announced that AIR 2.0 would be coming to these same platforms over the next year, allowing Flash Platform developers to create applications distributable through application stores such as the Android Marketplace.
See what Nvidea has to say about Flash and AIR:
A plethora of new tablet devices were announced, all of them supporting Flash and AIR runtimes. Many of these devices allow open development, full multitasking, and extensive hardware configurations.
What perhaps may be the most important long-range announcement is that the world’s largest wireless operators (Verizon Wireless, AT&T, NTT DoCoMo, Deutsche Telekom, China Mobile, and Vodafone among them) are uniting to create “an open international applications platform” in an effort to tap demand for mobile applications. As things stand right now, the mobile world is fragmented across different operating systems, runtimes, networks, and application distribution mechanisms. This new platform would provide a single point of entry for application developers and meshes well with the open, cross-platform application distribution environment made possible by Flash Platform technologies.
Mobile is huge right now and will only gain greater momentum in the years to come. The fact that so many mobile players are collaborating on these various runtimes and initiatives should be heartening to anyone invested in the future of mobile application development.
It’s a great time to be a mobile developer, and an absolutely stellar time for Flash Platform developers!
More info: