Adobe Ships Flash Player 10.2 For Android 3.x

MojoKid writes "Adobe last night announced the release of Flash Player 10.2 for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablets and it is available for download in the Android Market. Eventually, this could prove to be a big deal, but it looks as though a Honeycomb update is needed to take full advantage of the Flash Player 10.2's new features. It's not certain if it was intentional or not, but Adobe's statement points to an updated Honeycomb release, Android 3.1. According to reports, the new Android build is coming out soon for currently shipping Honeycomb tablets like the Xoom and Eee Pad Transformer."

Does this fix all the Flash apps

[topham]

Does this fix all the Flash apps that don't work well with touch?

Re:

[alienzed]

"Does this fix all the Flash apps?" fixed.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[giorgist]

"all" ... is that like saying, did they get rid of all the bugs ?

Re:Does this fix all the Flash apps

[drb226]

Yep. New feature: the bottom-right corner of the screen acts as a trackpad, which moves a pointer around the screen. It's just like having a mouse, and not having a touchscreen! But wait, there's more! Experimental builds use the front-facing camera like a Kinect, so all you have to do is stand 6 feet away from your tablet and stretch your arm out and awkwardly move the pointer around. There's also a special mirror you can buy for tablets that only have rear-facing cameras.

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[drb226]

As added fun for your gaming, when using the mirror, you need to move in the opposite direction (horizontally) of where you want the pointer to go.

Flash vs. HTML as opposed to hover vs. not

[tepples]

The big difference between mouse and (single-)touch interaction is the lack of a hover concept [w3schools.com]. Whether an application uses Flash or HTML technology has nothing to do with whether it uses hover or not. So in theory, Flash vs. HTML and hover vs. not are orthogonal [wikipedia.org]; how does this differ in practice?

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[Belial6]

Hover would be so easy to do. Just have a button or hotspot that when pressed says that your are hovering instead of tapping. Basically the opposite of a mouse that defaults to hover and clicks when the button is pressed.

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[topham]

Difference is most websites use hover to create a visual effect, while Flash often uses it to perform an action.

It doesn't matter if a link doesn't highlight when I touch it, it does matter if I have to hover over it to trigger it.

But how did it become widespread in Flash?

[tepples]

Difference is most websites use hover to create a visual effect, while Flash often uses it to perform an action.

So it's not the fault of Flash as much as bad Flash authors. But how did hover-as-action become more widespread in Flash than in HTML? Has Adobe specifically encouraged the use of hover-as-action?

Re:

[topham]

Simply became common practice as Flash apps were developed.

Moving Flash to mobile touch devices didn't cause developers to go back and re-write existing Flash apps. So we're stuck with the crap that doesn't work on touch devices, or idiotic solutions that add button crap to the screen to work around it.

Had Adobe created a Mobile Flash compatibility standard and only allowed Mobile Flash to load it, but otherwise supported the whole Flash environment it could have been possible to pressure developers to migr

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Uninstalled flash. Less problems and faster we

[shovas]

I uninstalled Flash 10 on my android a few days back. I can't remember what I used it for and it just ended up slowing down the whole browsing experience. Mobile sites these days know they can't use flash so most sites I visit just don't have it. It's great. And the ones that do end up going faster.

The problem with people

[Flipao]

They can't see beyond what's in front of them. Adobe are not just betting on the Flash player running old stuff that was made with mouse and keyboard in mind but also looking to it as a future development platform for touch based devices.

I'm not saying it is a good idea, but making fun of it because you can't play games that require a keyboard is missing the point entirely.

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[peragrin]

Not really as I have yet to see a non-adobe flash based touch friendly site.

hell 75% of flash sites are scroll wheel friendly and that has been basically standard for the last decade.

What makes Flash "touch friendly"?

[tepples]

As I understand it, any Flash application that has large enough buttons and doesn't rely on mouseover (that is, knowing the mouse cursor position while the button is up) is "touch friendly". Are there other things that figure into "touch friendly", or do most Flash apps fail even that?

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[nurb432]

future development platform for touch based devices.

God i hope not. Its already ruined the desktop/web world.

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[sootman]

> making fun of it because you can't play games
> that require a keyboard is missing the point entirely.

Adobe richly deserves to be derided. Their position is that you can not experience the entire web as it exists today without Flash. They are just refusing to admit that a lot of existing Flash content is completely unusable without a large screen, mouse, and keyboard. I'm glad they are moving forward and gearing Flash to touch but the simple fact is that it will be impossible to deliver what they've

Sympathetic towards Apple though...

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Flash is the only thing that still manages to crash Chrome and my computer. I am not a big fan of Apple, but they did do us web devs a huge favor.

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[__aapspi39]

Apple actually managed to do Flash a huge favor - the fact that a phone or tablet can run Flash is now a feature that customers value highly - if you doubt that then look at the advertising for these products.

It's a reality thing - most web devs i know are not at all interested in html5 or whatever it's called this week. After all, why would they want to spend precious time ironing out cross-browser issues, when the customers and businesses aren't interested?

html is great for static txt but that's about it.

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[RogerWilco]

I wrote this comment, but apparently I wasn't logged in.

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[slimjim8094]

'It's advertised'!='customers value highly'

I know a lot of people with Android phones, and not one of them cares about flash - despite what the TV ads say. A few of them installed it, but they all got rid of it in short order because they never used it, or the things they tried to use it for didn't work.

I tried Flash on my iPhone (yes, it's possible - look it up) and it worked fine - for what it worked with. It was sluggish, but that could be because it was a hack. More to the point, Flash is only useful fo

Android 3.1 is already out

[PCM2]

I'm the guy that wrote the negative review of Flash 10.2 on Android 3.0 [slashdot.org] a while back. Even back then, the beta version of Flash Player needed Android 3.1. The Android update was released pretty much simultaneously with the beta. And for all you who complained about reviewing a beta product, the beta version of Flash Player was also available for download by anyone for free via the Android Market, so it's not as if today is the first day you could do that, either.

I still stick with my original assessment: Ad

Re:

[VMaN]

How can you be better off without it? If set to load on demand it doesn't cost you performance or battery, and it's a nice thing to have for those few required occasions.. It's like saying you are better off without a raincoat because it gets hot when the sun is shining.. except the raincoat is always there when you need it, and you don't notice it when you don't... I just don't understand the argument.

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[PCM2]

You're better off without it because when the player is not installed, all the Flash content that would normally pop up in your browser is invisible. With it installed, you are suddenly aware of the Flash content, and it sucks trying to deal with it on a touchscreen. Also, it seems as though 75 percent of the Flash that you encounter in a browser is advertising, and I don't see why anybody would want to use their bandwidth on a phone -- with the carriers increasingly trying to lock down bandwidth -- to view

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[timestride]

Android 3.1 is not already out. Flash Player required Android 3.0.1 in order to be installed.

Hardware need to update too

[bmservice]

Haredware is not as compatialble as what flash needs.