{Editors Note:  This is a post from Stewart Putney the founder and CEO of Moblyng a developer and publisher of cross-platform social games for web and smartphones. Moblyng develops its own titles and publishers cross-platform titles for social gaming partners like Playdom and LOLapps. Moblyng currently has over 50 live game SKU’s across Facebook, MySpace, iPhone, Android, WebOS and Symbian.}

We have seen quite a bit of chatter over the last few weeks about Apple’s ban on Flash and Flash-based apps on the iPhone and iPad. Now developers are moving away from Flash to HTML5. The reality is that Flash for mobile devices has been teetering for years and the technology community should be thanking Steve Jobs for kicking Flash over the cliff for good. Moving forward, if developers want to build apps across multiple platforms, HTML5 is the future and Steve Jobs is giving developers the push they need.

What do I mean? Isn’t Flash a great technology for mobile? Hardly. In fact, Flash simply does not work for mobile and both Steve Jobs and Adobe know it. Don’t believe me? Try to find a full-featured Flash application on an iPhone, Android, WebOS or Blackberry smartphone…that’s right you can’t. After 2 years of “next quarter” promises Adobe hasn’t delivered, period. Meanwhile, rich, browser-based apps using HTML5 and advanced JavaScript can run on all major smartphone platforms right now.

Many pundits try and explain “strategic” business reasons for Apple’s decision to ban Flash on iPhones. They posit the ban has to do with “open vs. closed”, or long-term positioning against Google or Microsoft, etc…blah, blah, blah. The pundits miss the core issue- Apple is in the business of building beautiful and compelling consumer experiences. Consumers don’t care what code is used to build apps- they simply want them to be good.

The demise of Flash has little to do with Apple’s grand strategy and more to do with Flash’s clear limitations in an ever more mobile-centric world. On the desktop Flash’s well-known problems with heavy use of resources, instability and lack of security are overcome by its ubiquity- so most users tolerated these issues. But on mobile devices these are crippling limitations. While consumers may be used to the occasional Flash app crashing on our desktop computers, imagine that app running in the background on a phone and then crashing- during an important call. Or draining your battery in 45 minutes. Those would be an unacceptable consumer experiences– so Apple won’t allow them to happen. And the idea that Apple should accept converted “Flash to Objective C” apps is based on the same core concern. It is unclear how these apps really work and how well they would scale as the iPhone OS evolves. In the end converted Flash apps would pose a higher risk of a bad user experience. Thus, no support from Apple.

Meanwhile, a powerful cross-platform solution already exists- it is called the browser. Steve Jobs himself noted that with this summer’s release of Blackberry OS 6.0 all major smartphone browsers will be based on Webkit- and Webkit browsers support HTML 5. All of these platforms also support the use of the browser within native applications (including iPhone). This allows apps using web-based code to access all native functions of the OS using a “thin’ layer of native code. My company, Moblyng uses this architecture and popular Open-Source tools companies like PhoneGap provide easy access to these tools to thousands of developers. As for the web, Firefox already supports HTML5 and Microsoft just announced HTML5 support in IE9. We believe in the next 1-2 years over 90% of active web and mobile browsers in the US will support HTML5- providing developers with a truly scalable multi-platform solution.

What can developers do with HTML5? More than many realize. HTML supported Video, 2D graphics with canvas, embed SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), drag-and-drop and offline storage database all allow developers to build rich applications that match most popular Flash-based apps. In fact, the next YouTube or Farmville can be built right now using HTML5.  Does HTML5 do everything? No, for rich, 3D apps native code will be the better choice…for now (until Web GL gets traction and brings 3D graphic rendering to browsers). But for a developer who wants to reach the largest potential audience, developing for the browser and leveraging the power of HTML5 is the answer. Just ask Steve.

About the Author

Stewart Putney is the founder and CEO of Moblyng a developer and publisher of cross-platform social games for web and smartphones. Moblyng develops its own titles and publishers cross-platform titles for social gaming partners like Playdom and LOLapps. Moblyng currently has over 50 live game SKU’s across Facebook, MySpace, iPhone, Android, WebOS and Symbian.