Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch Leaves Adobe to Join Apple as VP of Technologies

Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch has left the company to take up a job at Apple as VP of Technologies. This piece of information was confirmed by Adobe PR in statements given to various media outlets.

Lynch came to Adobe through its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, and led the company’s engineering efforts in three domains — multiscreen, cloud and social computing.

Here’s the statement Adobe PR gave to CNBC:

“Kevin Lynch, Adobe CTO, is leaving the company effective March 22 to take a position at Apple. We will not be replacing the CTO position; responsibility for technology development lies with our business unit heads under the leadership of Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Bryan Lamkin, who has recently returned to Adobe, will assume responsibilities for cross company research and technology initiatives as well as Corporate Development. We wish Kevin well in this new chapter of his career.”

Though it’s not clear what Lynch would be working on at Apple, he will reportedly be working under Bob Mansfield, Apple’s SVP of Technologies. His designation would be VP of Technologies. AllThingsD reports:

A person familiar with the move says Lynch had aspired to eventually take the CEO job at Adobe, but that Shantanu Narayen isn’t giving that spot up anytime soon. At Apple, he’ll have a much less senior position, but potentially an important one, where he’ll be tasked with coordinating the company’s hardware and software teams.

Interestingly, Lynch was one of Adobe’s lead spokesperson when it came to defending Flash on Mobile back when the project was alive. He had been critical of Apple’s native apps approach on iOS, noting that it could harm the progress of the open web. Fast forward a few years, Mobile Flash is dead, native apps have become the de facto standard on most mobile OSes, and of course Lynch himself is joining Apple.