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.'"
Re:But the rest of the web still uses it... (Score:2, Interesting)
You must be new here, the clueless apple fans on this site have virtually killed it off. Slashdot is following its leader jobs down into the grave.
Btw check out air if u want to see why adobe are taking this step.
Re:But the rest of the web still uses it... (Score:5, Interesting)
You must not go out to eat very often.
Lots of restaurants still have their menus or even entire sites done in flash. I notice because I use Chrome on android which does not have flash and have to switch to firefox when I hit a site that depends on it.
Re:The best part of android lost (Score:4, Interesting)
I personally want flash on my new device.
Do I want flash to die - yes.
Unfortunately, some websites that I am locked into require flash, and being unable to use these on my new device will simply mean lack of flexibility and me needing to lug two devices, or use my old one.
Re:What instead of Flash? (Score:4, Interesting)
Then what would you prefer that animators use instead of Flash for their web animations?
I'd like a good answer to this also.
Right now there are three main applications designed for HTML5 animation (as opposed to HTML5 apps): Adobe Edge, Sencha Animator, and Tumult Hype. I know nothing about any of them. Some quick googling suggests that they're all new and still unproven, in various stages of polish and completeness.
The problem, I feel, is that Flash is being ostracized from the net too quickly, before mature tools to replace it are ready. I'm sure there will be a program that will allow hobbyists, amateurs, and professionals alike to create animations in the new standard of HTML5. But the software isn't quite mature yet. Certainly not as polished and feature-packed as Flash.
I just hope HTML5 lasts. If we go through a purge like this every few years, animation on the web may never fully recover.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
You say that as if that's a bad thing. Maybe it is for third parties, but from Apple's point of view and from the point of view of their users, prohibiting third parties from controlling the development ecosystem of a platform is the only thing that makes sense. Read what Jobs called the "most important reason" for disallowing Flash on iOS:
Sixth, the most important reason. [For not allowing Flash on iOS.]
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Also, to address your "fear is this will mean online video sites will start making their own apps that do not work on my linux desktops" I first want to ask why should iOS users and Apple care about Adobe's proprietary solution for your linux desktop. The only proper answer, of course, is *crickets*. The improper answer is that linux and everyone else in the world would be better off if video were (back-)implemented as an open standard which is where HTML5 comes in.
HTML5 will fix this problem of one company single-handedly controlling the future of web-delivered video. The problem was the fault of the big players who tried to corner the video codec market (Silverlight, Quicktime) with their own stupid plugins and losing to a respectable competitor, in this case Adobe.
Now that the battle has been lost Apple (and everyone else) understand that controlling the widget isn't as important as interoperability and you, as a linux user, should understand that fairly well.
Flash is going to die and everyone except for maybe a few Flash software engineers (and that temporarily) are going to be better off as a result.
Re:HTML5 didn't exist (Score:3, Interesting)
To be fair, when a lot of those classic toons were made, Flash was pretty streamlined and lean, capable of running on low-end machines. Current versions struggle to run on quad core CPUs with GPU acceleration.
If Adobe had stayed focused on keeping their product streamlined and lean, it would have had a fighting chance on mobile platforms, but instead... bloated code, security holes caused by bloated code, and update after update after update after update after update to fix the security holes. Bloated code hurts battery life and the constant updates eat up bandwidth that wireless providers loathe to increase.
Flash was a great product. It could become a great product again. But it would take someone with balls stepping up at Adobe and changing the culture so they don't push out products until they've actually gone through rounds and rounds and rounds of optimization, instead of just pushing them out after adding features.
Re:Where are all those Flash is the Future ppl now (Score:3, Interesting)
How many Android owners like it when NO other options exist?
Yes, Flash on phones is horrible. It's only slightly less horrible on tablets. And many SWFs designed for keyboard-and-mice-toting desktop PCs are useless.
All these problems, plus the poor battery life and general sluggishness of Flash, were certainly convenient scapegoats. They're even true. But Jobs wasn't an idiot. He knew that if Flash had been available in iOS, legions of developers would have used it to do an end-run around the app store's restrictions. That's not about money (what Apple makes from the app store is trivial compared to what it makes on hardware) but about protecting the brand. Jobs foresaw a future where Flash became the default development platform for the iPhone, with all the crappy performance it exhibits on Android, and he didn't want that reputation for his product. The iPhone was already taking enough heat from at first requiring devs to make HTML apps; remember that Jobs didn't want native apps available at all.
And for the record, I own no iOS devices, am not an Apple fan, and can completely see where Jobs was coming from.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)