Adobe Stops Flash Player Support For Android 332
New submitter Craefter writes "Adobe has finally seen the same light Steve Jobs did in 2010 and is now committed to putting mobile Flash player in the history books as soon as possible. Adobe will not develop and test Flash player for Android 4.1 and will now focus on a PC browsing and apps. In a blog post, they wrote, 'Devices that don’t have the Flash Player provided by the manufacturer typically are uncertified, meaning the manufacturer has not completed the certification testing requirements. In many cases users of uncertified devices have been able to download the Flash Player from the Google Play Store, and in most cases it worked. However, with Android 4.1 this is no longer going to be the case, as we have not continued developing and testing Flash Player for this new version of Android and its available browser options. There will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1. Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th.'"
Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
It's filled a gap, but with better apps, chrome being integrated now, time to let it retire gracefully.
Sure there'll be a way to sideload it just in case it is needed for something in particular.
That's the thing, when Jobs said it should die, many agreed, but to not (at the time) offer an alternative, wasn't the best way to handle it. The web moves on, html5 (and the browsers) are more common, standards are just about standardised.
Bye flash. Take a chair next to the blink tag over there.
And... (Score:4, Insightful)
DaFuq? (Score:0, Insightful)
One of the biggest reasons to get an Android phone.... gone.
The best part of android lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to browse the web in full and view flash contents is on of the best features of android phones. Flash has been a useful technology and I don't understand why it's being viewed as a good thing that it's going away. I understand open standards being used opposed to proprietary technology, but this seems more important for developers than end users. I honestly don't care how I get the content as long as I can, but why not continue to develop the technology that sets the phone apart?
and... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:2, Insightful)
Was anyone denying it then?
Jobs was no sage, Flash was known to be utter garbage for many years before he spouted off on the topic.
He did not say those things because he meant them, they were said because if iOS ran flash then applications could have been used on it that were not vetted by Apple.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:5, Insightful)
aww darn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:5, Insightful)
But, can anyone deny Jobs's statement was inaccurate now?
I do not think that means [wikipedia.org] what you think it means.
Industry failure (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems people are too harsh on Flash, for no reason really.
Personally I see it as a failure of the tech world to understand why some people were stubbornly holding on to Flash.
Flash was a very easy way for product designers to develop some pretty advanced client side technologies, with a plugin that had more than 90% adoption rates. iOS changed that, much to adobe's chagrin.
But like some commenters said, this technology is now being killed without proper replacements. You still can't do socket communications directly from within a browser without using plugins. Definitely not with UDP. This was one of the reasons Flash was awesome. It filled the gap of all those features missing in a browser (or available only in some and not in others).
And let's not even start with the authoring tool - I have yet to see a tool that was as friendly and intuitive as Adobe's for producing Flash apps.
Re:But the rest of the web still uses it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had an iOS device for many years now and I can literally count on one hand the number of times I _NEEDED_ Flash. And, as time goes by, that number is not growing - any website with even a vague hint of what's going on offers an alternative to Flash because they know cutting out the rather large mobile market is a bad idea.
The only real impact the lack of Flash has had is that I don't see Flash advertising and, believe me when I say, I don't miss one second of it.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:3, Insightful)
He decided to kill it to prevent applications that did not use the iOS store from running on iPhone. It had nothing to do with flash sucking and everything to do with control of the platform.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:5, Insightful)
The feature was being allowed to have it if I wanted, not flash itself. I don't have it installed on my phone, but I do on my tablet. Amazon video for instance uses it. My fear is this will mean online video sites will start making their own apps that do not work on my linux desktops.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:2, Insightful)
Jobs wasn't right, but his statement was self-fulfilling. Adobe abandoned the mobile Flash Player BECAUSE Apple would never allow it on iOS, and iOS owned too much of the market for Flash to have a chance on mobile without it.
It had nothing to do with Flash being unable to work well on mobile. The benchmarks show conclusively that Flash performs better on Android than HTML5+JS. Further proof of this is that Flash continues to work well and be supported for app development on both iOS and Android. And by "works well," I mean that some of the top selling apps for iOS were made with Flash.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:2, Insightful)
YES Jobs statement was inaccurate. But his war on Flash was successful.
I just wished that instead of wasting time trying to kill Flash he had simply fixed the piece of frakking divinely condemned fecal matter that is iTunes. (Sorry for the profanity, but I have NEVER EVER in my life dealt with a worse piece of software.
Re:In summary (Score:4, Insightful)
The why... (Score:3, Insightful)
He decided to kill it to prevent applications that did not use the iOS store from running on iPhone.
Then why did Apple so heavily promote HTML apps, even after the App Store came around... year after year they have added more support to help HTML apps look and feel like native apps and able to use the same APIs.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you refuting that Flash drains battery, runs slow and eats up precious RAM on the phones that support it? How many Android owners actually like to use it when other options exist?
No HTML Media Capture (Score:4, Insightful)
year after year they have added more support to help HTML apps look and feel like native apps and able to use the same APIs.
Let me know when iOS supports access to the camera and microphone from HTML [w3.org] without having to use PhoneGap (which requires a Mac and a paid dev cert).
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:5, Insightful)
There was no store when the first iPhone was launched. Apple also did invest quite heavily in a (at the time) emerging and badly supported competitor: HTML5 (even going as far as pretenting that it will be the only way to develop for iPhone). Considering the standard of 2007 in mobile browsing (i.e. tiny screen displaying abridged version), they could have gotten away for a lot more control freakiness.
And let's not forget that Adobe has had a love hate relationship with Apple for quite a bit of time and with Flash, they showed a continuous stream of bad quality release and general lack of interest in the platform. (and continue even today - Flash sucks on Mac)
So indeed, that is control of the platform. However, rather than profit motivated, that is the classical control of the platform: avoid your competitor to control your platform or have your user blame you for somebody else mistakes.
Interestingly we can compare that decision with the biggest competitor of the iPhone: Android. Android did support Flash and java. Yet it took 4 years for a highly motivated Adobe to produce a version of flash that run smoothly, but only on an incredibly powerful 1 GHz double core mobile phone (in 2007, people would have laughed at you for thinking that was even possible) And for java, you have Oracle suing Google for not lining enough money in its pocket. Really, as a CEO trying carve a new niche in a highly competitive market, would you like to depend on those 2 (Oracle, Adobe) "partners" ?
Re:What instead of Flash? (Score:4, Insightful)
I assume you've never heard of Homestar Runner or Weebl and Bob or Animutations or the entire content of Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep.
I've heard of Homestar Runner, but I've never heard of the others. Having been online nearly every day for the last 15 years, I can tell you that those are hardly critical (even notable) aspects of the web or web experience. As for how to get Homestar working in a non-Flash world, javascript is powerful enough now to handle anything I've seen on Homestar.
Part of his complaint with Flash was that (Score:4, Insightful)
it was a proprietary 3rd party extension that could be neglected or dropped at any time by Adobe for a given platform. How did that prediction turn out for Android?