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Flash Support Confirmed For Android 2.2
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.'"
In the left corner we have Adobe, who demonstrates the power of the web enhanced with cross-platform plugins, but makes little effort to cooperate on forming the albeit openly published Flash VM spec and makes a fairly unstable reference implementation (not helped by the lack of process isolation in browsers).
In the right corner we have Apple, whose proposal of the extra-DOM canvas element to troll Adobe (rather than following the example of SVG) further complicated the monolithic monster that is W3C's HTML standard.
In the centre we have consumers, who get to enjoy that there are so many standards to choose from.
This isn't the iPhone. There are other options available.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
...and how is .h264 an open standard, again?
"I'll give them credit for sticking to their guns about open standards for the web"
Tell us you're being sarcastic...
No one could possibly be stupid enough to take Steve Jobs' rambling tirades against 'teh Flash' as some sort of effort to support 'open standards'.
Flash allows developers and users to freely bypass Apple's tollbooth for content.
I'm thrilled that I'm able to use whatever software I want on Android. The problem is, I don't actually want Flash - I just wanted the ability to decide for myself.
So, that's great that you will be supporting it, but please let me turn it off or uninstall it from my phone.
Thanks.
I recommend you read arstechnica's rebuttal of Steve Jobs's claims. Pot, meet kettle indeed. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/04/pot-meet-kettle-a-response-to-steve-jobs-letter-on-flash.ars
Unlike a certain dictatorial and litigious cellphone manufacturer, Google is giving their users a choice. Flash haters certainly have reason for their dislike, but I think the decision of whether to use it or not should be left in the hands of users and webmasters, where it belongs. Good move on this, Google.
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.
The problem I have is while they dress it up as sticking to their guns on open standards, their true motive is they want people to write to the proprietary technology of iPhone apps instead of flash apps. They make legitimate criticisms of Adobe as tying up the web in a proprietary technology while at the same time clearly moving to punish any developers that would want to target iPhone+others using cross-platform tools rather than limited and proprietary iPhone only apps.
I can't get excited over the concept of rooting for either Adobe or Apple in their little pissing contest. I dislike what both want the industry to look like.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yawn. The same mantra was repeated again and again when iPhone was introduced and disallowed you to install native applications while you could do that on Windows Mobile and Symbian. According to Jobs native applications were the tool of devil and could bring down the whole GSM network.
Guess what, there were no hackers to attack both systems then, there are none now. And the GSM networks somehow survived.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
To be honest I'm rather surprised it's taken this long for Adobe to release a portable version of Flash for smartphones. I think this speaks to how cozy and lazy Adobe had become with their control of the market. Jobs's remarks were indeed hypocritical, but if he is to praised for anything it's for lighting a fire under Adobe's cushion.
I also think Jobs's "letter about Flash" was far from coincidental. Now that his competitors will have a defining feature that makes their smartphone experience significantly more enjoyable, Jobs either had to relent or push on with an self-inflicted platform deficiency. The letter was just him setting down the battle lines.
Competition is great, but Apple's use of their control of the iPhone hardware to control the iPhone software market is anti-competitive, and I for one am happy to see Google stick it to them.
Jobs loses this, we all lose.
Don't buy Apple if you wish, but stick a fork in Flash.
I won't deny that Flash is not everything we would want it to be, but Jobs obviously envisions a platform that is patented and locked down to the exclusion of all competitors. At least Flash has the merit of being multi-platform. On that basis alone, Jobs can go get fucked.
Disclaimer: typed on a second-hand MacBook. Some of Apple's ideas and hardware are great, but Steve Jobs is a nasty piece of work, and whoever donated his liver should have been retrospectively aborted.
It's extremely annoying to see Mr Jobs deny me access to customers based on his idea of perfection.
As a small restaurant/club owner, I spent a lot of time creating a Flash-based website so that it would be more appealing to customers than an HTML site. Is Mr Jobs really suggesting that I should now create an app for my business instead?
This is great! Now whenever I need to find out what does or does not support flash, I can just come to flashdot! Seems to be all that's posted here nowadays.
Flash wasn't built for mobile devices.
If you want it to suck cycles on your desktop or most laptops, that's not a problem, for your PC or Mac has them and electrical power to spare, generally.
But Flash sucks the electrical life out of mobile devices. This isn't theory, it's fact. Take your laptop off AC power and see it die after a few YouTube videos or Flash games.
I'm not against Flash. I'm against it on devices that must be reliable and are built with limited processor and electrical power.
Flash is the Web standard of .NET. It's sloppy. It's developer hasn't made great inroads to optimize it or secure it. It is flexible, but some of its features make little sense on a multi-touch screen. And only Adobe makes it.-
If Adobe wants to side with another platform for Flash AND make it work, great. But apparently Apple doesn't want to be Adobe's guinea pig and it has every reason not to.
Apple has already dealt before with competitors both inside and out who change their business plan and as a result, leave Apple twisting in the wind. It's good business practice not to let your business become overly dependent on others. Hell, Adobe was in that situation when Apple began to flounder. So why would Apple emulate Adobe in that regard?
As for Flash on the Android? Let's see it, then. What doesn't kill your phone only makes it stronger.
Perhaps Apple will have Billy Dee Williams in for some endorsements, standing over a person with a locked, overheated phone.
" Problem with your Droid? "
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
But can you install them on any Android phone? Which I think is what he was after.
If you can flash the device, then yes, you can install them on any phone. It's a replacement of the OS.
There are websites that tell you how to get in to the various rom-flash modes for each phone.
A lot of the stuff they are doing, though, can be done with apps (including tethering for almost all devices and carriers), so I'm not sure what the point is, really. They do have kernel tweaks, but I'm not sure they're worth it.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
It's weak, because the rebuttal talks about H.264 not being open, but Steve Jobs didn't claim it was, he called it an industry standard, not an open standard.
And Flash isn't an industry standard? When all the industry leaders - and nearly all the industry followers - support it, it seems to me to be a de-facto industry standard.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You know .mp3 was made available under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms - at first. 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.
According to Wikipedia, only the IETF and ITU-T refer to their standards as "open standards". Everybody else just calls them standards, even though they all require the reasonable and non-discriminatory terms of these so-called "open" standards, because that's what they are - standards. The only reason they are open is because you have to lay them out when you apply for the patents. Pretty much all definitions of the word "standard" require reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Else they can't be a standard, by definition.
Hey guess who owns the rights to the h.264 standards? Why, it's the ITU-T! This "Open Standard" stuff is just smokescreen to trick the Open Source proponents into feeling like they aren't getting screwed over by these corporations. An "Open Standard" is absolutely no different than any other official industry standard. It's not really that much different than de-facto standards either, their openness and wide-use is what tends to make them standards in the first place.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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>.
Keep up, it's not Flash vs h.264, it's Flash vs Javascript and HTML5. Video format is not at question here. You're looking for the h.264 vs Theora war, that's in a different article.
Apple being douchey about video formats doesn't change the fact that they are fully supporting open web scripting standards.
Facebook is the new AOL
It is a rebuttal from Ars, because they requested that he be a guest writer. The article itself also frames it pretty clearly for you, so there is no need to frame it again.
While he is absolutely on the extreme end of the open source argument (he thinks just the software being open isn't good enough, but that everything supporting that software should be open as well), he nails the hypocrisy of Jobs's letter.
First, despite what the ITU-T calls it, h.264 is not an open standard, there is nothing about them that is different than any other proprietary industrial standard. It has very restrictive licensing terms that are not publicly available. They can and will sue you if they catch you implementing h.264 without paying them for the privilege.
Second, every time Jobs uses "Adobe" in his letter, you can replace it with "Apple", and every time he uses "Flash" you can replace it with "Cocoa" or "iPhone OS" or "App Store". Thy are completely interchangeable in the complaint, so Jobs very plainly is not at all interested in maintaining free and open standards on the web. Apple is no different than Adobe in this regard, they are both struggling for control over their users.
Contrast that with Google, who is saying "Yeah, you can use that if you want, we don't mind, but look here's something even better and it's free!" Obviously event he great Google isn't perfect, but they at least don't share the pot-kettle relationship of Apple and Adobe.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I'm thrilled that I'm able to use whatever software I want on Android. The problem is, I don't actually want Flash - I just wanted the ability to decide for myself.
So, that's great that you will be supporting it, but please let me turn it off or uninstall it from my phone.
Thanks.
I'm not sure why this keeps coming up, since nobody that ever replies clearly has ever owned an Android phone. My HTC Hero, which supports Flash 7 out-of-the-box, has an option in its browser to disable plugins.
You have the option to disable Flash on your Android phone right now, and it's FUD to keep suggesting that you won't be able to disable it again in the future.
But console manufactures don't care which middleware tool you use to build games for their platform. This is the clear distinction. A developer can use something like Gamebryo to build a 360, PS3, and Wii game as an example, where as with Apple this is not allowed.
If Apple were actually consistent in which apps are excluded, that would be one thing, but they are not, so it's really hard to gauge what they'll allow one week from the next, especially when they change the language in their TOS.
Anyways, I agree on the efficiency no matter what toolset is used. Let the customer decide if they like or dislike something and crap will always get flushed out. I certainly learned to not trust most content from the App Store as it's battery-hogging-crap, much of which was coded with Objective C.
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.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
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.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
You can thank apple's open source work on WebKit for a big part of that.
It's worth noting that since it was made open-source, Apple has been more of a hindrance than a help to the development of WebKit, with their constant attempts to force control of it in spite of the community's desires.
You clearly did not read the letter from jobs. He does discuss the proprietary nature of iPhone OS.
Clearly, neither did you. He touts h.264 as an open web standard, which despite what the ITU-T group likes to label it, it is not. At the same time, they are making veiled threats at Ogg Theora, which is an open web standard. That's some great promotion of "openness on the web" there.
Basically, you can exchange "Apple" and "Cocoa" or "App Store" for every single instance of "Adobe" and "Flash" in Jobs's letter. Open standards proponent my ass!
Combined with the performance issues, crashing issues
What crashing and performance issues? I haven't experienced any on my Android. I personally like flash, it would be nice if something less proprietary were better, but it does a lot of things that simply cannot be done in HTML5 (even with h.264), JavaScript, and CSS. Adobe will fix any touch issues eventually, they have a very strong incentive to make it work well, so that's really only a "for now" issue. HTML5+h.264 isn't even widely adopted yet, so how is that any different than the "touch" issue for Flash?
Saying we should be using h.264 instead of Flash because Flash isn't an open standard is like saying we should buy Lamborghini's instead of Ferrari's because Ferrari's are too expensive. Lamborghini's are just as expensive for all the same reasons as Ferrari's. It doesn't wash.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller