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Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Arrives For Android
adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe announced that it has released the final version of Flash Player 10.1 for Google's mobile operating system. The app will be available for download via the Android Market for those users who have Android 2.2 (Froyo) installed on their phones. Devices expected to offer the Android update include the Dell Streak, Google Nexus One, HTC Evo, HTC Desire, HTC Incredible, Droid by Motorola, Motorola Milestone, and Samsung Galaxy S. Flash Player 10.1 was also released to support devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months."
If Apple sees that this increases Android usage, they'll reverse policy on the Flash block, and users everywhere will praise Steve for his insight and timing.
And right after that, Apple fans will complain that Android phones are copying Apple's iPhone.
That's great and all, Adobe, but we're all still waiting for Froyo to be released...as an official OTA, or as an official source release :(
No, and no Moment, G1, Cliq, Backflip, etc. You need a minimum of a Cortex A8-family processor to run Flash and many lower-end and older Android phones just don't pack the horsepower to pull it off.
There is a difference between "insightful" and "inciteful" other than spelling.
So, I've tried it on my Nexus One. It seems to play videos ok, but that's about it. You can't really interact with the flash because no flash videos are designed for touch input.
On the BBC news video players you can't control playback because the clickable area on the time-line is far too narrow to hit. You also can't drag anything because this just scrolls the website.
Conclusion: Steve Jobs was right; flash doesn't belong on phones and I'm glad he is killing it, even if he is still an annoying control freak.
This assumes that Adobe then don't tell Steve to go f**k himself.
> You also can't drag anything because this just scrolls the website.
The N900 has a special "cursor mode" that, when enabled, changes the dragging from scrolling to moving a virtual cursor that allows sending drag events to the browser (flash or javascript). I'd guess android could have something similar added if it doesn't have it already.
I have Flash on my Nexus One running FroYo...honestly, its not that bad. Youtube videos run very smoothly for me (much more so than the actual Youtube app, that thing is garbage IMHO). It's only when you see pages with lots of crap (ads) on them that performance becomes an issue. You can set the plug-in to On Demand, but when you select one flash object to load, I've noticed every flash objects loads and then performance suffers.
I'm actually using Beta 3 (the final version doesn't seem to be in the market despite what the article says). It is much better than the first beta and generally isn't too bad.
You *can* zoom in using pinch-to-zoom but it doesn't really help. Even with the controls filling the screen you can't drag, and many controls are just too damn small.
You can also double-tap on the flash to make it fill the screen, which works pretty nicely, but even then you can't drag! (wtf?)
All in all, I don't think anyone could have done a much better job, but the fact is no current flash movies were designed for use on phones, and it shows badly.
It's pretty crappy when you have to switch to "virtual cursor" mode in order to interact with a site. That's really going to win users over. Perhaps not such a smart business decision to go with Flash and a write-once-deploy-everywhere strategy?
--- What?
Your still accepting the company line on Flash?
If it is about the tiny screens of phones then why is there no Flash on the iPad.
No, there are a variety of strategic reasons why Apple doesn't want Flash on their products. For example, Apple wants to force as much materials as possible (games, video, news, etc) into the app store or iTunes. This allows them to take a cut of any revenue and block it if they don't like it.
Flash goes against that strategy. For example, it allows DRM'ed media and lots of cross-platform games to be delivered via the web, independent of Apple.
Now, I'm not suggesting that Flash is as efficient as native code, but then again, neither is JavaScript. Sometimes we need to make trade-offs.
But you see, the whole point of having flash on phones was so that you could really get the "full" web, and that developers dont have to redo all their work.
Now, most of the flash content is not designed for touch input and phones screens, so you still cant really access that content on a phone in a meaningful way. (I tried to use the FIFA World Cup Matchcast flash app on a droid, not really usable). Developers will have to redesign their flash sites for phones anyway.
They might as well spend their time writing an apps, or an HTML5 site.
Some existing flash apps might work well enough on android tablets, but where are these now?
Given that Google, MSFT, Opera, Mozilla and Apple are all behind HTML5, if you were a developer, which way would you go? As an individual developer what skills are you more likely to want to develop at this point to differentiate yourself?
Now I'm just waiting for Netcraft to confirm that Flash is dying...
There are several reasons Apple doesn't want flash on their phones. Part of it is exactly what you describe. Part of it is the user experience, like the GP described. Part of it is that they don't want to be held hostage by Adobe when iOS 5 comes out and breaks compatibility with Flash so that they are reliant on Adobe to make things work "like they used to" (from the perspective of Apple users.)
Adobe has treated Apple as a second-class citizen for a while, and Apple doesn't want to be a 2nd-class citizen in the mobile device market. There's no way that they're going to let their devices lose features unless it's on their terms, and if they have a third-party runtime in their OS, that's exactly what could happen.