Image via Wikipedia

In the news today:

At Mobile World Congress™ 2010, Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced advancements to the Adobe® Flash® Platform including the unveiling of Adobe® AIR® on mobile devices, a consistent runtime for standalone applications to come out of the Open Screen Project™, an industry-wide initiative led by Adobe that has grown to close to 70 ecosystem partners. With support for the Android™ platform expected in 2010, AIR provides developers with a feature-rich environment for delivering rich applications outside the mobile browser and across multiple operating systems via mobile marketplaces and app stores. AIR leverages mobile specific features from Flash® Player 10.1, is optimized for high performance on mobile screens and designed to take advantage of native device capabilities for a richer and more immersive user experience.

Adobe also announced that a beta of Flash Player 10.1 was made available to content providers and mobile developers worldwide. With the general availability expected in the first half of 2010, Flash Player 10.1 is the first consistent runtime release of the Open Screen Project enabling uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and high definition (HD) videos across screens including new tablet devices, smartphones, netbooks, smartbooks, desktops and other consumer electronics.

This is a game changer with big repercussions:

1. Google/HTC Nexus One is only first of a generation of Android phones to support Adobe Flash, with many other supporting platforms to come.
2. Adobe Flash brings in 6 million developers, all video content and Flash-based applications and online games available on the web… to all platforms but iPhone.  Some dozen million apps are low quality, right… just like bad and extremely successful Youtube videos.
3. Apple continue to tout HTML5 and native apps for iPhone and iPad. Steve continues to be hypocritical and lure the faithful macheadkind only.
4. Google do both HTML5 and native apps, but Flash content is still massively popular and supported by Android
5. Security hazzards happen on the Android and Flash fronts, which threaten to make a lot of bad noise, but they’re a good trade-off for openness for most people.
6. Apple become (once again) a boutique shop for the US and Europe, without markets of global scale comparable to the Android family (you know… the other 5.5 billion people out there)
7. Microsoft continue to be largely irrelevant, they attempt to make another iteration of Windows Mobile on Zune or something as b0rk3d as that, and try to tie it in with Windows 8   (a ’sh*t halo’ effect of sorts)
8. A few stupid network operators and stupid smartphone builders  make Android forks with different UI and different apps, possibly even different application markets but they stupidly die soon enough. This tends to favour Flash apps that run more or less the same on all Androids, but reality will be more heterogeneous with a few great native-Android apps and a larger number of Flash ones.

UPDATE:  a few hours after I posted this article,  prediction #7 is already ongoing… we’ll see