Flash is a browser plugin that is installed widely around the world, it was an amazing platform and drove the web forward with creativity and gaming accessible to millions.
Adobe has previously announced the end-of-life for the flash plugin and at the end of the year the plugin will be disabled and no longer accessible to users.
As previously announced in July 2017, Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after 31 December 2020 (“EOL Date”). We made this announcement in collaboration with several of our technology partners — including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla — which issued complementary announcements with more technical detail on what the Flash Player EOL will mean for developers, enterprises, and consumers using their specific OS environments or browsers.
What will happen?
Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.
This means that any content that you still use that relies on flash will cease to operate into 2021. Adobe have built in a “kill switch” into recent version of flash so that even if you still have a version installed on your machine it will no longer work.
What can we do?
If you have a flash based application that you still rely on there are solutions that we can provide to ensure you can continue to use the application beyond the end of the year.
The best solution is to repackage your application as an AIR application. AIR is a very active development tool and is built from the same language and framework as flash so we can output an application to most common environments developed from your existing codebase. This allows us to repackage your web content to run as a desktop application.
If your content relies heavily on javascript or content contained in the hosted webpage, AIR may not work. In these cases we can offer a packaged browser solution, whereby we create an application that contains a browser with a version of flash which we can load your content into. The content can still be hosted on the web as normal.
Lastly we can offer development services to migrate your code to Haxe which utilises many of the same elements as flash and can be used to output to modern web technologies.
Why choose us?
distriqt has been involved in flash and AIR development for over 10 years. We were heavily involved in the flash community and we had great success with many flash sites over the years. More recently we have become the leading developer of AIR native extensions and are heavily involved in AIR development and in the AIR community.
Over the past year we have helped several clients prepare for the flash EOL creating dedicated browser applications and converting flex/flash based web applications into AIR desktop applications.
All this positions us to have a wide knowledge of the flash environment and the avenues available to keep your application running into the future.
If you are needing help please get in contact and we can work with you to mitigate the effects of the flash end of life on your organisation.
