Matt Alexander writing at The Loop on why mobile Flash was never as great as advertised:
Hardware manufacturers continue to tout Mobile Flash’s relevance. Best Buy clerks try to sell you on the advantages of Flash over sans-Flash platforms. Ads flaunt the apparent benefits of a Flash-enabled web on your tablet and phone. Meanwhile, reviewers across the web grapple with its usefulness and buggy implementation. So, the question is, why has there been such prominent exposure of one feature?
Remember six months ago when the HP TouchPad was a new thing and one of its big deals was that you got “the whole web”? When I used the HP TouchPad for a week, my experience was that Flash worked better than I had expected it to, but worse than I’d wanted it to. Or, put another way: it did work, but barely.
What I found especially frustrating about Flash on the TouchPad was that if I disabled it, video sites would simply say I need to install the Flash plugin rather than serve me the HTML5 video. If I were to visit that site on my iPad the site would know I was on an iPad and would serve sans-Flash video. But it seemed they only would sniff for iPad or not. And if not, then I needed Flash.
Hopefully, websites will begin serving HTML5 video whenever it’s supported, falling back to Flash if HTML5 video support is absent.