Dive Brief:

• Adobe announced it will stop updating and distributing its Flash Player at the end of 2020, according to an Adobe blog and reported by VentureBeat.

• Adobe is suggesting content creators begin moving existing Flash content to open formats. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have all announced plans to end support for Flash.

• Because some games and apps are built on Flash, Adobe said it will continue to issue security patches and to maintain the software through 2020, giving those that depend on it plenty of time to migrate their applications elsewhere.

Dive Insight:

Adobe’s troubled multimedia player has been dying a slow death for several years. Last summer, Mozilla announced it would discontinue support for Flash. In May 2016, Google also announced it was ending Flash support for its Chrome browser.

Adobe Flash has been plagued with security and stability challenges. Adobe had to fix three zero-day exploits early in 2015, and addressed 79 security holes in an update, in addition to other patches throughout the year. That still didn’t solve all the problems, however. In April 2016, Adobe issued an emergency update to Flash after a flaw that allowed hackers to circulate ransomware to Microsoft Windows users was discovered.

Given the many options available to computer users today, Adobe likely saw killing Flash as the best option. Fixing it has clearly not worked, and the multimedia player’s reputation has been irreparably tarnished.