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Flash Support Confirmed For Android 2.2

Posted by Soulskill on from the but-it's-so-much-easier-to-just-write-a-rant dept.

farble1670 writes "In an interview with the New York Times, Google's Andy Rubin confirmed that Android 2.2 will have support for Flash 10.1. Quoting: '[Rubin] promised that full support for Adobe’s Flash standard was coming in the next version of Android, code-named Froyo, for frozen yogurt (previous Android releases were called Cupcake, Donut, and Eclair, and are represented outside Building 44 on the Google campus with giant sculptures of the desserts). Sometimes being open "means not being militant about the things consumers are actually enjoying," he said.'"

10 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe good... maybe bad by MasterOfGoingFaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hope it doesn't turn out that Flash is the x86 code of the Internet age.

    While I dislike Apple's my-way-or-the-highway approach, I'll give them credit for sticking to their guns about open standards for the web. This will be interesting to see what happens with Flash, given the growing gap between devices that support it and those that don't.

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    Place nail here >+
    1. Re:Maybe good... maybe bad by Junta · · Score: 2, Interesting

      You probably complained about that.

      Way to presuppose something about my stance that conveniently demonizes me.

      I really didn't have much to say on the matter. When it released, I tried it out, thought it was a harbinger of good things to come, but it lacked some features that made me wait until a less button-averse set of manufacturers really got into the game. I actually had to wait longer than I thought before I got a WebOS device that pretty much fit my requirements, which is a testament of how far ahead of the game Apple was in technology. iPhone was a disruptive (in a good way) technology in a cell-phone industry focused on milking the status quo.

      However, my complaint is not that they 'allow' native apps, it's that they game the industry to give developers little choice in the matter in a fairly anti-competitive way. Not only do they force third parties to use native apis by shooting down and forbidding cross-platform toolkits, they also restrict feature-set and approval processes to protect first-party software efforts from third-party efforts on their platform (i.e. no IM background capability in their new 'multitasking', which seems to be reserved for upcoming iChat enhancements). I have no idea why they would give such a crippled multitasking experience after so long a delay, but it seems clear they still don't want third parties to have capability they use themselves.

      --
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    2. Re:Maybe good... maybe bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Flash is a closed standard.

      Flash is partially open - Adobe has provided the .swf spec for everything but the proprietary video codecs, which are not technically "Flash."

      But even if it was and open standard, H.264 would still beat it quite handily in video quality and file size (bandwidth).

      See above - video codecs are not the same thing as Flash. This is essentially the same situation as QuickTime being an "open" standard supporting closed codecs.

    3. Re:Maybe good... maybe bad by Mr2001 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And I still find it funny that the whole "open" Android crowd is cheering that they get a closed plugin.

      An open platform means anyone can develop for it, even proprietary software. Contrast it to Apple's closed platform, where you can't get that closed plugin because Steve has a chip on his shoulder. There are open source Flash players that could, theoretically, be ported to Android just as Adobe is doing (if anyone felt strongly enough about "closed plugins" that they were willing to port an open one). Again, that's something Steve won't let you do on the iPhone.

      Also, most Android phones already ship with closed applications from Google. That's what the scuffle with Cyanogen was about, which is why installing CyanogenMod now involves backing up those closed apps and then restoring them after flashing the new OS.

      --
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    4. Re:Maybe good... maybe bad by BitZtream · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Perhaps you should realize that your definition of 'open standard' isn't one that anyone outside of the OSS community subscribes to.

      It is available to anyone to implement anyway they care to without any discrimination in who gets to buy it for what purpose.

      You can fully examine the standard.

      Just because it costs money does not mean it isn't open.

      OSS people have just gotten retarded and confuse 'open' and 'free' as if they are interchangable, and then have several different definitions of free that are used in various situations to promote the OSS agenda.

      You really need to get some perspective if you want OSS to continue to be meaningful, the more you act like irrational jackasses by making retarded statements like you just made, the more every sane person in the world realizes they don't want listen to some fundimentalist nutjob such as yourself.

      h264 meets pretty much everyones definition of an open standard outside of the minor collection of GPL zealots out there. Just because you have your own retarded/warped definition of open standard doesn't mean anyone else gives a shit.

      Learn the difference between open standard, open source, and free because you clearly don't know the difference which is pretty much standard operating procedure for GPL zealots.

      --
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    5. Re:Maybe good... maybe bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Once it was popular the IP owners started putting on the squeeze. At the very beginning .mp3 licenses were pretty much free. Not so any more.

      "pretty much free" as in MP3 implementers just didn't pay, and "the squeeze" as in the licensors decided to start asking them to?
      I guess I would have more sympathy if a bigger audience actually paid for licenses...

  2. Re:thats nice but by Bigjeff5 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are a lot of things Flash does that HTML5 will never do.

    What Jobs really wants is to replace Flash with Cocoa (since he knows HTML5 and JavaScript will never be good enough) so he can sell you all the dev tools and get royalties on any third party tools.

    What's the motto that is so selectively applied? Follow the Money?

    --
    Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
  3. Re:Some of you keep forgetting something... by gaspyy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Flash 10.1 uses hardware acceleration for video, so presumably battery life will be longer.
    Also, on Adroid, Flash delivers better performance than HTML5/Canvas (http://visualrinse.com/2010/04/15/benchmarking-html5-vs-flash-player-10-1-on-mobile-devices/).

    Regarding "some of its features make little sense on a multi-touch screen" -- nothing springs to mind, care to elaborate? It does have rollover support but that doesn't mean that you have to use it. It has multi-touch support too...

    As for security... I can only recall 3 major flaws in the last 5 years; maybe there are more but it's still not more insecure than Java or IE.

  4. H.264 badgers? by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Flash is a closed standard. But even if it was and open standard, H.264 would still beat it quite handily in video quality and file size (bandwidth).

    Would a vector animation like Badgers really be smaller as H.264? The closest contender here involves scripting a <canvas>.

  5. Re:Hackers have a new window by rtfa-troll · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What was that whoosh? Low flying ducks again?

    Damnit; of course Apple's signing is the only thing protecting us from the void. That's why networks with Symbian phones (where the user can install just about anything they want) collapse almost every day of the week. Nothing at all to do with Apple being a bunch of control freaks.

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