After the announcement, developers have started a petition to turn Flash into an open-source project, leading to controversy. In July 2017, Adobe announced that it would declare Flash to be end-of-life at the end of 2020, and will cease support, distribution, and security updates for Flash Player. In 2015, Adobe rebranded its Flash authoring environment as Adobe Animate to emphasize its expanded support for HTML5 authoring, and stated that it would 'encourage content creators to build with new web standards' rather than using Flash.

As a result, it was not adopted by Apple for its smartphone and tablet devices, which also reduced its user base and encouraged wider adoption of HTML5 features such as the canvas and video elements, which can replace Flash without the need for plugins. Apple restricted the use of Flash on iOS in 2010 due to concerns that it performed poorly on its mobile devices, had negative impact on battery life, and was deemed unnecessary for online content. Although Flash was previously a dominant platform for online multimedia content, it is slowly being abandoned as Adobe favors a transition to HTML5 due to inherent security flaws and significant resources required to maintain the platform.

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