Adobe announces the end of life for Adobe Flash, with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla all working together for a smooth migration off reliance on Flash.

Adobe will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to the new open formats.

Adobe first created Flash and Shockwave as a format for pushing more interactive and creative content on the web in the forms of videos, games and other interactive content. As the web evolved, the format was widely adopted by the community, forming the basis for open standards.

Flash has been widely adopted into various industries and businesses, especially gaming, education and video. Adobe will continue to support Flash up to 2020, actively helping customers and partners migrate their platform off flash. This will include issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed.

However, since its conception, open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have changed and matured. These open standards now provide capabilities and functionalities, whether natively or as plugins, that used to be filled by Flash; these  have become a viable alternative for web content.

Adobe remains that they will continue to contribute to HTML5 standard, as well as participating in the WebAssembly Community Group. To push forward with animation and video tools for HTML5 content, Adobe will be pushing Animate CC and Premiere Pro CC.