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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.'"
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.
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.
So, let me get this straight: instead of doing the rational thing to maximize the number of users who could benefit from the content of your site by first presenting the content with the most broadly supported subset of HTML before building a "premium" presentation of the content that would be accessible to a smaller set of users using a technology that is less universal like Flash, you excluded many potential customers by building a flash-only site that they could not use from the many web-enabled devices (including the iPhone) that don't have Flash, and you blame Steve Jobs for limiting the reach of your app by not correcting your decision by bringing Flash to the iPhone?
Maybe you need to consider that the problem here isn't with Steve Jobs.
What makes you think Flash would be more appealing to people visiting your website? When I go to a restaurant's web site I want to see a menu, the hours of operations, and maybe a picture of some of their entrees.
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
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.
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
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.
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 are confusing Flash lite, a limited subset of Flash with "Full Flash" in Adobe parlance, which is coming with 10.1. No shipping smartphone save the Nokia N900 ships with a full featured Flash runtime.
The Maemo plugin is a sluggish performer from what I've heard too. Adobe really needs to hit the Flash 10.1 for Android release out of the park, or risk validating all of Jobs' criticisms.