What is Flash used for? In my experience, Flash is generally used for the following:

• Ads
• Games
• Music Players
• Movie Players
• Photo Galleries

Lets look at each one of these categories in a bit more detail.

Ads: Those annoying, flashy (excuse the pun) banners you see on some of the riff-raff sites of the internet. The big, ugly, strong-coloured patches in the websites you visit… generally are Flash. Very few people appreciate Flash ads. As a matter of fact, they were one of the leading instigators in the ad-blocking plugin market.

Games: This I believe is the only category that truly justifies the ‘interactive’ benefit that Flash provides. There is nothing else that remotely comes close to the power of Flash interactivity for web interface games. However, I have a problem with the category. It is generally either children or reclusive adults that tend to play Flash games. The majority of the adult population use the web for information consumption. The majority of children/teenagers will use a dedicated gaming device. I also think that as the iTunes App Store market matures in the gaming category, the majority of users will find much more value in natively coded games.

Music Streaming Another category that Flash is very prevalent in usage. Sites like MySpace, Last.fm, and others tend to use a Flash player by default. The reason for this is that Flash tends to be a very quick, easy to implement solution for music playback and playlist generation. There is nothing else available right now that offers the webmaster anything nearly as easy to implement. Until HTML5 becomes a bit more prevalent, Flash will be used de facto for music playback in the browser. Fortunately for us iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad users, some of these sites have published API’s, and some have their own dedicated app in the iTunes App Store (e.g., Last.fm). Also, the majority of iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad users will have iTunes syncing their music to their device.

Movie Players I would argue that this category would come close to Music Streaming in prevalence of Flash implementation. Unfortunately for Adobe, HTML5 offers a native implementation for movie streaming, via the ‘video’ tag. As HTML5 browsers become more prevalent, and sites like YouTube switch to either a single HTML5 portal, or a dual HTML5/Flash service, Adobe will have a harder time justifying the need for Flash in the Movie Player category.

Photo Galleries As an amateur photographer, I’ve found that the many self-hosted photo gallery solutions for servers are Flash based. However, this is again generally due to laziness on the part of programmers, or because there are a lot of easy, of-the-shelf solutions for the photographers with little computer knowledge. There are many native web coded galleries that work just as well, and are not hard to implement. Unfortunately, the majority of photographers do not have much of a budget for displaying their photos on the web, and generally hire a low-cost (usually inexperienced) web developer to build a photo site for them. There’s no technical justification for using Flash to display a gallery of photos.

Over the next few years, as HTML5 capable browsers become more ubiquitous, and providers start providing dual-service HTML5/Flash streaming, the need for Flash Movie Players will become miniscule. Thanks to the iTunes App Store, the desire for Flash games is swiftly disappearing. As applications like Lightroom and Aperture continue integrating web-publishing, photographers using professional tools for their photos will have less and less need to hire a third-party, inexperience web developer for Photo Galleries. In the end, the only justification for a webmaster to use Adobe Flash is for publishing Ads, and using it as an easy-to-implement Music Streaming player.

Related posts:

1. Response to John Nack & The Flash Blog
2. iTunes 9
3. Microsoft vs. iPad

First, in response to John Nack, who makes the point that Flash has brought standardization to the web. Yes, while it did bring a standard to the web for a while, once Adobe purchased Macromedia, Flash itself started fragmenting into many different versions which supported different levels of features. This resulted in many users having to upgrade their Flash plugins depending on the site visited. How is this any better a ‘standard’ than HTML5? Might as well force the user to upgrade their browser to a standards-compliant version.
So, Flash provides ubiquitous browser video playback? Who cares? YouTube and Vimeo are switching to HTML5, Hulu is committed to providing iPad compliant service, and everyone else doesn’t care what they use to play video in their browser. As Internet Explorer 8 begins mass penetration (via Windows 7) and Internet Explorer 6 support is dropped (as Google announced yesterday), Flash will become less & less important. Lets be honest here. The only reason Flash is really needed is IE6′s existence. Everything else can and should be implemented via HTML5 and standards-compliant services such as OpenType.
John Nack concludes with a point that the Flash team will likely be using the GPU to bring fast performance to the desktop plugin. Who cares? The iPad and iPhone are mobile devices. Utilizing a separate GPU to do the processing is irrelevant on a mobile device that uses System-on-a-Chip design.
He also makes the point that the download size for QuickTime is twice that of Flash. Irrelevant. Most of the Flash-haters he is targeting with this post (and most Adobe CS users) are running a Mac, with native support. And most people with iTunes installed (read: everyone with an iPod/iPhone) have QuickTime installed as part of Apple Software Update. So no, ubiquity is not dependent on the download size of your plugin.

Second, in response to The Flash Blog. Have of the sites you illustrated have an iPhone compliant version (as pointed out by Mark Hughes here), and likely more will by the time iPad launches. Other sites have worthwhile iPhone app alternatives. Why should I use your plugin if the iPad supports native HTML5, and the majority of video media is capable of being delivered to me that way (YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu?) I don’t want to play Flash web games, and with the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, most games that people will be playing will be native iPhone apps anyway. So there is no use for Flash for media playback or gaming on iPhone OS. What does Flash offer me then?
Your Flash plugin performance sucks. Small wonder Apple didn’t want didn’t want a battery pig like that on the iPhone and iPad.

Flash is dead. I hate the platform with a passion, and while I’d love to watch it die a long and slow death, the faster it goes the better. With Google’s latest announcement that they will stop supporting IE6, HTML5 ubiquity will hopefully begin. Flash is useless if my content is delivered to me through other streams, whether the iTunes store, HTML5, or a dedicated app. If I want an ‘interactive’ game, I’ll stick with a native iPhone or iPad application. There is nothing that Flash offers me, and no real way for it to ‘innovate’ against the march of technological progress. Welcome to the New World folks.

Related posts:

1. Adobe Flash
2. Microsoft vs. iPad
3. Chrome Frame