Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Stops Flash Player Support For Android
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.'"
I don't think anyone is gonna sit down here with this plate of crow and some ketchup. But, can anyone deny Jobs's statement was inaccurate now? http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Just sayin.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
It's filled a gap, but with better apps, chrome being integrated now, time to let it retire gracefully.
Sure there'll be a way to sideload it just in case it is needed for something in particular.
That's the thing, when Jobs said it should die, many agreed, but to not (at the time) offer an alternative, wasn't the best way to handle it. The web moves on, html5 (and the browsers) are more common, standards are just about standardised.
Bye flash. Take a chair next to the blink tag over there.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
Nothing of value was lost.
In summary, "We have too many customers, too much market share, and wholly believe that's a bad thing, especially in light of the looming competition from open standards such as HTML5."
Being able to browse the web in full and view flash contents is on of the best features of android phones. Flash has been a useful technology and I don't understand why it's being viewed as a good thing that it's going away. I understand open standards being used opposed to proprietary technology, but this seems more important for developers than end users. I honestly don't care how I get the content as long as I can, but why not continue to develop the technology that sets the phone apart?
If Adobe had given it a stable interface it could have Bern a real and useful standard. Instead, Adobe never setlled its interface which made it unmanageable to support across a variety of devices.
zero fucks were given
I haven't read what he said, but Flash was a piece of shit that should have been killed LONG before the iphone
Then what would you prefer that animators use instead of Flash for their web animations?
Except for that fact that NO ONE decided to kill flash from their system. Jobs did. That decision made Jobs a leader.
You can always get a blackberry...oh wait....
Awwww man, without flash player, how are people going to rig mobile websites to load viruses onto my phone? It was an even bigger plugin security hole than its PC counterpart.
But, can anyone deny Jobs's statement was inaccurate now?
I do not think that means what you think it means.
It seems people are too harsh on Flash, for no reason really.
Personally I see it as a failure of the tech world to understand why some people were stubbornly holding on to Flash.
Flash was a very easy way for product designers to develop some pretty advanced client side technologies, with a plugin that had more than 90% adoption rates. iOS changed that, much to adobe's chagrin.
But like some commenters said, this technology is now being killed without proper replacements. You still can't do socket communications directly from within a browser without using plugins. Definitely not with UDP. This was one of the reasons Flash was awesome. It filled the gap of all those features missing in a browser (or available only in some and not in others).
And let's not even start with the authoring tool - I have yet to see a tool that was as friendly and intuitive as Adobe's for producing Flash apps.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
I've had an iOS device for many years now and I can literally count on one hand the number of times I _NEEDED_ Flash. And, as time goes by, that number is not growing - any website with even a vague hint of what's going on offers an alternative to Flash because they know cutting out the rather large mobile market is a bad idea.
The only real impact the lack of Flash has had is that I don't see Flash advertising and, believe me when I say, I don't miss one second of it.
He decided to kill it to prevent applications that did not use the iOS store from running on iPhone. It had nothing to do with flash sucking and everything to do with control of the platform.
The feature was being allowed to have it if I wanted, not flash itself. I don't have it installed on my phone, but I do on my tablet. Amazon video for instance uses it. My fear is this will mean online video sites will start making their own apps that do not work on my linux desktops.
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.
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.
Jobs wasn't right, but his statement was self-fulfilling. Adobe abandoned the mobile Flash Player BECAUSE Apple would never allow it on iOS, and iOS owned too much of the market for Flash to have a chance on mobile without it.
It had nothing to do with Flash being unable to work well on mobile. The benchmarks show conclusively that Flash performs better on Android than HTML5+JS. Further proof of this is that Flash continues to work well and be supported for app development on both iOS and Android. And by "works well," I mean that some of the top selling apps for iOS were made with Flash.
A bony skeletal hand reaches out from a grave and chokes the life out of Flash.
They have only killed it for Linux and Android, and it never existed for iOS. You can still target Windows and OSX users with it, do not despair.
Chat with other atheists http://secularchat.org
At a guess, they've drafted all the former Linux & Android Flash devs to work full time on trying to patch the Windows version roughly as fast as new vulnerabilities are being discovered.
The headline isn't entirely accurate. Adobe is only supporting flash on Android devices in which it is currently installed. In August, if you don't have flash installed, you ain't gettin' it. They've also come up with a list of "certified" Android hardware whatever in the hell that's actually supposed to accomplish.
Now then, notice that Adobe continues to support and develop Flash for the Windows platform. This is the largest marketshare of desktops out there. If Adobe "saw the light" , and conceeded to some Apple fanboi fantasy land, they would most certainly be dropping all Flash support across the board and declare it "not a profitable direction for the company" or some other such reason.
The fact that Adobe has Nixed the Linux version of Flash for FireFox, and now raising issue with Android, leads me to wonder why they are focused on crippling the two most open and alternative systems out there.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Bullshit. If Jobs wanted to lead the way to destroying flash he should have banned it from OS X too. The fact that he didn't just proves what everyone has said all along that the real intention of banning Flash on iOS is to eliminate an avenue for people to make money selling stuff without paying an Apple tax.
Chrome will continue to support flash on linux.
Wow, you obviously have no clue as to the history of Apple & Adobe.
See desktop publishing tools. Here's a start:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/04/14/chronicles-of-conflict-the-history-of-adobe-vs-apple/
Adobe fucked Apple at it's low. Apple took this chance to pay them back, and then some.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I just wished that instead of wasting time trying to kill Flash
In what way did Apple "waste time"? Instead, they saved a HUGE amount of time by not having to try and optimize Flash to the point it would work well on a limited chipset, but not having to worry about browser integration.
Apple didn't try to kill flash so much as they said "we see no place for it on mobile" and then proceed to spend resources on other things. So instead of wasting time, you have to ask just what else would have been not quite as well done in order to have Flash support to begin with.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Then complain to those restaurants. Tell the manager/owner: "Did you know that the menus on your website don't work on the iPad or iPhone?" (Don't bother mentioning Android; just stick to the iPad/iPhone since everyone knows what it is.) Most likely this crap was done by a cut-rate web development shop without their knowledge. I don't think most restaurants want to lose business from mobile users if they can help it.
He decided to kill it to prevent applications that did not use the iOS store from running on iPhone.
Then why did Apple so heavily promote HTML apps, even after the App Store came around... year after year they have added more support to help HTML apps look and feel like native apps and able to use the same APIs.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are you refuting that Flash drains battery, runs slow and eats up precious RAM on the phones that support it? How many Android owners actually like to use it when other options exist?
year after year they have added more support to help HTML apps look and feel like native apps and able to use the same APIs.
Let me know when iOS supports access to the camera and microphone from HTML without having to use PhoneGap (which requires a Mac and a paid dev cert).
Oh but they ARE fixing iTunes.
Haven't you heard? They're adding facebook integration and making iTunes lean toward getting people to use the iCloud.
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/06/itunes-will-get.php
And, in case you missed the memo, iCloud is that platform that desktop apps can only access if they are sold from the Mac App Store.
http://www.macstories.net/stories/the-state-of-icloud-enabled-apps/
Of course, it's all for the benefit of the end-user.
Same thing with killing off Flash. It's not that they thought Flash was a piece of garbage - which in many ways it was - but that they would much rather people develop native apps.
Kill Flash, and what cross-platform alternatives are there? HTML5? Ah, yes... HTML5. Because that's looking like it's such a winner right now (and by 'right now' I mean for many months previous and many more months to come).
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/08/16/0248232/hard-truths-about-html5
http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/06/22/186249/the-death-of-an-html5-game-breeds-an-open-source-project
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/06/28/1719233/facebook-ios-app-ditching-html5-for-objectivec
While JAVA is perfectly capable, it, too, is not supported on the iDevices.
And, again, users aren't exactly complaining. It's not their problem if a developer has to put in extra work to support multiple platforms just because they can't fully rely on cross-platform app development, but it is their problem if an HTML5 application fails to work because the browser doesn't support what's in the specs yet. It is their problem if their favorite game's sound is laggy, won't play more than a few sounds simultaneously, etc. because the browser->sound system wasn't built for it. It is their problem when they try to use a JAVA-based navigation app only to realize that on the platform chosen, JAVA can't access the system's GPS because the manufacturer believes that's far too dangerous a piece of information to be left in the hands of JAVA developers.
tl;dr: Flash's death would have been better if HTML5 were a more realistic competitor.
Hm, Apple users satisfied with their devices, versus moping insulting haters who have decided one particular brand of electronics is their infidel.
I am glad I belong to the first camp. The second must have really sucky lives.
There was no store when the first iPhone was launched. Apple also did invest quite heavily in a (at the time) emerging and badly supported competitor: HTML5 (even going as far as pretenting that it will be the only way to develop for iPhone). Considering the standard of 2007 in mobile browsing (i.e. tiny screen displaying abridged version), they could have gotten away for a lot more control freakiness.
And let's not forget that Adobe has had a love hate relationship with Apple for quite a bit of time and with Flash, they showed a continuous stream of bad quality release and general lack of interest in the platform. (and continue even today - Flash sucks on Mac)
So indeed, that is control of the platform. However, rather than profit motivated, that is the classical control of the platform: avoid your competitor to control your platform or have your user blame you for somebody else mistakes.
Interestingly we can compare that decision with the biggest competitor of the iPhone: Android. Android did support Flash and java. Yet it took 4 years for a highly motivated Adobe to produce a version of flash that run smoothly, but only on an incredibly powerful 1 GHz double core mobile phone (in 2007, people would have laughed at you for thinking that was even possible) And for java, you have Oracle suing Google for not lining enough money in its pocket. Really, as a CEO trying carve a new niche in a highly competitive market, would you like to depend on those 2 (Oracle, Adobe) "partners" ?
So why does Adobe hate Windows so much? Is it some kind of evil plan for sabotage that they're going to keep supporting Flash on Windows?
My guess is they're in cahoots with the malware suppliers who rely on Flash. These must have grown tired of trying to find easy ways into Linux, Android, or iOS, and want to limit their future efforts to the low-hanging fruits in Windows (and maybe OSX).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
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.
blog
I don't mind it. The mobile version seems to be a fair bit more efficient than the desktop version, meaning that some things that stutter on even my 2.53Ghz i3 with 8GB of RAM play just fine on my Atrix 4g. I plug in every other day to charge, whether I've used Flash or not, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference at all.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Yeah! Flash was the worst, except for every other alternative out there.
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.
Moof!
when Jobs announced flash wouldn't be supported on the iOS platform.
He was right, this forum was wrong.
it was a proprietary 3rd party extension that could be neglected or dropped at any time by Adobe for a given platform. How did that prediction turn out for Android?
Nah Flash was always a terrible product, it's just that no one knew it back then. Wonder why Flash Player 10+ has so much bloat? It's because it can STILL run all that old crap that was developed for the original Actionscript Virtual Machine (FP8 and below). Not only that, as Flash became super popular it also became a vector for an increasingly large number of malware attacks which necessitated all of those fixes and patches, and the awful, AWFUL flash player security model that is the bane of every single Flash developer's life. If we could have FP10 and ONLY FP10 in a flash player that would be grand, and a good start at streamlining the player for CPU / power usage conscientious users. Finally, with the addition of new capabilities for flash player, like 3D, all those animators and designers that made the 'streamlined' oldschool animations... Guess what happened to them? Well they've continued to make all those fancy animations except now they use a bajillion 3rd party code libraries (because programming was never in their job description) and LOOAADS of GPU hungry effects. Seriously, most Flash developers aren't actually developers in the traditional sense at all. Case study: me having to fix the old flash "developer's" game code to add new functionality and finding that the player control handling code was duplicated in every single level for the game, which was itself a separate flash project.
...I used to mail them a "FYI" so they could improve...
Dear Sir/Madam:
I am an anonymous angry person on the internet. I don't judge restaurants by the food or quality of service, but rather how much money they pay someone to make a website on their behalf. Your website has buttons, and I don't like the software you used to make those buttons. Since you so obviously have poor decision making skills, I will not be eating at your establishment. The risk of choking on my food in a fit of hyperbolic rage is just too high. In the future, if you would like angry anonymous internet users to patronize your restaurant, I highly recommend changing service providers.
Hugs and Kisses,
Anonymous Coward
The point here is that Flash is never the right answer in mobile.
Mobile has a pretty harsh download cap compared to wired access from a home PC, and a lot of places still can't get a 4G signal at all. This makes the order-of-magnitude overhead of conversion to H.264 not the best answer either. So what method of delivering vector animations is "the right answer in mobile"? You point out "plenty of ways to get a job done better"; what are they?
>>>>>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...
When did people stop believing in freedom? I should be able to run any program on my computer or my handset (which is just a small 4" computer) that I desire. If I want to run a program, for example a game, that is flash-based then I should be able to. It's MY computer and I will do whatever the hell I want with it. You people who enjoy bowing down and saying, "No I don't want freedom to run any program. You know better than me. Praise daddy warbucks" make no sense to me? It's as if you ENJOY being children. (Grow up.)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Adobe: "Oh yes.. Jobs was right. Flash is going away. We've really got to eat crow now. Boy are we embarrassed. Believe me...... Oh! Hey! we've just released Adobe AIR 2.7 for iOS and it's 4 times faster. You should go check it out. *grin*"
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
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.
People are never as simple as their stereotypes. This applies equally to Christians, Muslims, and Emacs-lovers.
Yep, you replaced a program that the owner didn't mind if you made a FOSS version with one controlled by patent trolls and which is in bed with MSFT and Apple, two companies with a LONG history of locking down and not playing nice...congrats.
Mark my words FOSS lovers, you are gonna look back one day soon and go "WTF was we thinking?" because MPEG-LA will end up royally fucking you over. H.265 is coming and guess what? To replace platforms like Flash and Silverlight its gonna be a DRM delight and YOU won't be able to play the content. Nobody is gonna make FOSS DRM and with Apple and MSFT behind H.26x you're gonna get royally buttfucked. Adobe never said boo, let you bundle flash with any distro royalty free, even left the Gnash guys alone, you think MPEG-LA is gonna be that nice? BWA HA HA HA HA, they are patent trolls!
So congrats to the whiners that have wanted flash to die because the Linux version was buggy, just remember when web video becomes as locked down as the iPhone whose fault it is, which would be YOU! You should have refused to abandon flash until a FOSS codec like WebM or Theora was chosen as the minimum for HTML V5 but you didn't, instead you are gonna hand the entire web over to Apple, MSFT, and Google who will end up locking down Android so they can play H.265. After all they can afford to pay the $699 license fee, you can't. Boy did y'all get scammed!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.