Flash and AIR: Record downloads, winning platform race

January 29, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Adobe Flash, the company’s platform for web applications and video, is already on virtually every computer everywhere, but the latest version is on an even faster track to world domination. Flash Player 10 and AIR have been downloaded a record number of times, the company announced today.

During the two months after Flash Player 10 was officially released in October, it was installed on 55 percent of Internet-connected computers, and is on track to be installed on 80 percent by the halfway point of 2009. Unfortunately, Adobe didn’t include any past adoption numbers for an apples-to-apples comparison; it only says Flash 10 is “far outpacing the installation rate of past versions of the software.” The company previously told me that the last version of Flash reached 62 percent market penetration in three months.

Still, the rapid growth underlies Flash’s continuing dominance. Flash 9 is now on 98 percent of Internet-connected computers — which is, y’know, a lot — and Flash 10 will presumably match or exceed that number. In comparison, Microsoft’s competing Silverlight platform has been making inroads (for example the official presidential inauguration site used Silverlight), but had only reached 25 percent penetration as of last October.

With AIR, meanwhile, the “record numbers” claim is a bit disingenuous, since there aren’t any previous versions to compare it to. There are hardly any comparison points at all, since Adobe was the first big tech company to release a product like AIR, which allows developers to build hybrid web/desktop applications. Still, more than 100 million downloads in less than a year gives Adobe a healthy advantage over newer competitors, like Sun’s just-released JavaFX.

Update: Adobe tells me Flash Player 10 has been adopted around 60 percent more quickly than Flash Player 9, which reached 35 percnet market penetration in its first two months. You can see more numbers here, and an illustration of relative adoption rates here.

[photo:flickr/jondoeforty1]

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • "Adobe didn’t include any past adoption numbers for an apples-to-apples comparison"

    Hi Anthony, there's some at the census link, and more at the Internet Archive:
    http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/fla...
    http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.macrome...

    Ted Patrick is in Japan, and has a photo of a slide with relative adoption rates:
    http://onflash.org/ted/2009/01/flash-player-10-...

    tx, jd/adobe
  • Thanks, John, I updated with your links and some of the other stuff Adobe just sent me.
  • Marten
    What a great infomercial.

    Any independent way to check these claims?
    Do Mozilla, Myspace or Facebook or similar independent organizations have any numbers that would give credibility to Dowdell's claims?

    And what does it mean that a new version is downloaded faster? Was it because of better tools for updating (e.g. PSI Secunia) or the recent publicity around the Flash click hijacking or the bundling with Adobe Reader?
  • OK, I admit that "winning the platform race" is probably a bit hyperbolic, since I don't have up-to-date numbers from Microsoft. But I think that's reasonably clear in the post itself. Also, I think I was clear that I find the numbers interesting, insomuch as they reinforce existing trends, but not that revelatory or useful since due to the absence of comparison points.
  • "Do Mozilla, Myspace or Facebook or similar independent organizations have any numbers that would give credibility to Dowdell's claims?"

    huh? me? wha'd I say...? ;-)

    jd/adobe
  • I'm with Marten. Did you guys even check with Microsoft before posting that Adobe won? I'm pretty sure a buttload of people watched the inauguration...
  • Microsoft still has a ways to go to catch up to flash but remember that its only been out for a bit over two years now and 1.0 was basically a psuedo beta.

    Flash is great, AIR is pretty nice as well but Silverlight has a couple advantages that will really be noticed once it reaches critical mass.

    1) Developing is more developer friendly b/c it supports javascript, C#, and Iron Python for writing apps in it

    2) Built in video serving capabilities are superior with automaticly handly the video feed in comparison to the bandwidth the user is experiencing.

    3) Deep Zoom is pretty damm cool and you will start to see some nice uses of it as more people develop on it
  • Yes, all good points, I suspect there will become increasingly common to have install both Silverlight and Flash,
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