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Adobe Officially Kills New Flash Installations On Android
hypnosec writes "Adobe has announced that it will be making the Flash Player for Android unavailable for new devices and users from August 15 in continuation of its plan to discontinue development of Flash Player for mobile browsers. The company announced its decision through a blog post and further said that only those users who have already installed the flash player on their devices will be receiving any future updates. To ensure that this is the case, Adobe is going to make configuration changes on its Google Play Flash Player page."
Flash has always sucked on mobile. I'm glad Adobe is finally admitting it.
I don't like flash but it doesn't cause as many headaches as poorly rendered html 5.
I'm certain it was Steve Jobs that killed Adobe Flash player on mobile devices a couple years ago.
Good.
Now, people will have to find other ways to use 3 MB of libraries and forty thousand machine instructions to change a single pixel on the screen from black to orange.
These words have been a mantra of mine for years. I suspect that many other people share this worldview. The death of flash cannot come soon enough for many, many good reasons.
I'll light the bonfire, who's bringing the beer? Is killing flash the best thing Steve Jobs ever did?
I've never seen a company "give up" like this. I would have thought Adobe would have a vested interest in making their software work on a platform everyone is clamoring to dominate. It's like they just said "meh,.. F- it". They also discontinued Flash on Linux (not sure about mac).
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
But doesn't this mean Android devices are going to be only able to view half the web now? I thought Flash was the amazing killer feature of Android...
This is the part where I point and laugh at you for being right all these years.
Specifically, the dogmatic apple haters that piled their support behind flash.. Only because 'ol Jobs called Adobe out on the pile of crap that is flash.
I'm bored with being civil about it. :D
Suck it. Suck it hard.
Will be actually cheering this. I wonder how long its gonna take to sink in that "Hey we just got rid of one proprietary format....for a patent troll's wet dream, yay us!"
Of course since the late great iSteve was all for H.264 then it HAS to be good...right? He wouldn't have any ulterior motives, like say splitting mobile with MSFT and thus would actually WANT something patented up the wazoo to discourage competition? Naaaahhh..
Sheesh wake the fuck up folks! At least Adobe didn't give a rat's ass where and how you distributed Flash, hell they didn't even bitch about Gnash at all and you trade someone THAT easygoing for a "Pay your $699 license fee you cocksmoking teabaggers!" troll group? Just try distributing H.264 support without cutting a check, just try and see how quick you get a C&D. Look I'll be the first to admit that on anything but windows Flash was badly written, I mean it was by Adobe for God's sake. But you DO NOT replace a pile of shit with a punch in the nuts alright? That is NOT progress!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
- Prince Vultan
And nothing of value was lost.
Adobe loses either way.
Not if Adobe produces tools to recompile existing Flash vector animations into JavaScript+SVG or JavaScript+Canvas and recompile ActionScript into JavaScript. Isn't Adobe Edge part of this effort?
...but we only have fourteen hours to download this bloatware!
You do realize that Flash videos are just H.264 in MP4, right?
Prior to the use of H.264, it was H.263. Prior to H.263, and continuing for some time after H.263, it was vectors. For example, Weebl's Stuff, Homestar Runner, and most of the animations on Newgrounds and Albino Blacksheep are vectors. What tool for authoring Canvas or SVG vector animations for an HTML5 environment do you recommend?
NOT A SINGLE FUCK WAS GIVEN!
Really. I'm so sick and tired of flash and what it's used for anymore.
It's one of those things i never WANTED to use. But was forced into using to do other things. And now 98% of the flash i encounter is an invasive ad.
it's bloated buggy crap. it's always been bloated buggy crap. it will always be bloated buggy crap because its an adobe product and that's all they produce.
Just go the fuck away already.
Send out the kill command. Delete all flashplayers from the world!
So is it possible to somehow grab a copy of Android Flash now that would be installable in the future?
This is a really bad day to be working for Kongregate.
I do not see the need for a flash player going away any time soon due to the immense amount of content in Flash. Flash is so widespread it is hard to get rid of. It seems Adobe is attacking Google here, perhaps because Google is switching to HTML5.
I agree it would be best for Flash to disappear, Adobe is a corrupt, evil company that uses various unsavory practices. But how to get contnent developers to stop using it? As long as people keep making stuff in flash unfortunately it will remain popular. Part of the issue is making a good replacement for flash. HTML5 helps a.lot with this but as well what really makes flash popular is that developers love Adobe Flash development tools. The sad thing is flash's development tools are very popular with developers and I do not see them giving up flash until something better comes along. I have yet to see anything come along that actually can exceed the features and ease of use of Adobes tools.
Many here presume Flash will go away. This is sort of like saying Linux will become popular, people here do not understand why people use software, they use software because it works well. Adobe has great tools that work well and just expecting people to stop using them when there are no alternatives or the alternatives are inferior is absurd.
Hell is going to freeze over before most of the restaurants I visit build usable websites. Now they won't be viewable from mobile at all!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Flash wasn't just about videos and ads on the internet. Some of us developed useful applications like forms for front line people, reports for pointed hair people and video games (look up sharpform - a lot of video game UI's run on Flash). Its sad that the platforms it supports is shrinking and not growing.
Ages ago when I worked for Adobe - an internal conference was show casing everything they just acquired from Macromedia. The mantra was "the future of the company is everything we just acquired" (that wasn't the official mantra, but after attending plenty of developer sessions that was what I was feeling) - I'm sure that is still true to a certain extent, but there was a genuine feeling that Flash could actually take on Java as a web runtime - especially because we were going to have the worlds first full runtime on a mobile device (at the time they were talking about Symbian and WebOS).
Don't laugh - one of the internet's biggest websites youtube.com runs on top of Flash media server :) (or at least it used to!). Also this was long before HTML-5 and Javascript was showing any promise. If you wanted to have a rich web app your choices were Java or Flash.
So exactly why do we need Flash for web video? We don't. It's superfluous.
We don't need it for web video, where "video" refers to compressed sequences of pixel-based images. But we still need it for web vector animation. I tried converting a .swf vector animation to video by rasterizing each frame of the animation and compressing the frames as a video, and the file size bloated by a factor of ten.
Flash video IS H.264 in almost every case
How big would "Badger Badger Badger", a 36-second vector animation loop, become if converted from vectors to H.264? Or "We Drink Ritalin", a music video for a John Desire song? Or "French Erotic Film", a music video for an Ome Henk song?
Anyone know how it will be affected as it used Flash to play its video's?
Then patronize the restaurants' competitors. I just tried chick-fil-a.com, for example, and it works just fine in Firefox with Flashblock on. Do you want me to try the site on my Nexus 7 tablet when I get home to make sure it's 100% pure HTML5?
I'm guessing that people in iPlayer's territory will just download the iPlayer application from Google Play instead of the Flash Player.
How so? Kongregate has an HTML5 games section.
as soon as this bug lands it'll be available on nightly builds, preffed off by default. The name of the about:config preference to toggle to true is:
media.plugins.enabled
They need to kill flash everywhere next. Also kill acrobat
Just buy one of the good ones.
That depends on which carriers the good ones work on. The budget carriers in the United States, for example, tend to run CDMA2000 instead of GSM, and CDMA2000 is much worse than GSM/UMTS at letting customers bring their own phone. Which U.S. carrier offers voice and data service as cheap as Virgin Mobile's $35/mo plan yet allows customers to bring their own phone? Or is a customer supposed to buy two phones: one to run apps (as if it were a 4" tablet) and one to make calls?
Adobe Flash player both release and debug versions (including the Android versions) are available from the archive: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html#main_Archived_versions
Never give the C-Suckers at adobe a single penny.
If u must use their software, pirate it.
Also, even if u decide to pirate it, look for an open source solution for the long-term.
The company and their software is pure garbage.
They do not care about their users. Their software is full of security flaws and waste.
They purposely make try to make ppl dependant on them, then tell them how/when/where they can use that dependancy. (ex: Large percentage of websites use flash, then they choose which platform they support based on their corporate interests rather than their users interests).
Never give adobe a penny!!!
Will I'm at it, same goes for Apple, Microsoft, Oracle.
Die Flash Die!
Die iDouche Die!
Die Secure Boot Die!
Die Java Die!
Lets also Nuke Mecca/Medina
-HasH @ www.trypnet.net
On top of this youtube supports HTML5
Not for videos with advertisements, which are likely to be marked "not available on mobile" because the Flash ad player won't load.
That is an example of the sort of mystery meat navigation that would get a site featured on webpagesthatsuck.com: a logo and seven donuts that respond to mouseover. And it's not even Flash-based MMN; it's MMN in HTML. Back to CFA for me.
Flash on Android isn't going away, it's just changing. You can write apps in Flash, package them as Adobe Air apps and install them on Android just fine. That's how it's worked on iOS for a long time now because of Apple's restrictions on browser plugins, so I imagine this is just their way of consolidating development efforts on both platforms.
If Ballmer scores Flash exclusivity for Windows/8/RT and Surface then he trully earns his (evil)genius CEO pedestal right next to Gates and Allison.
Adobe certainly hates Linux/Android and had some feuds with Apple too, so this might not be completely off idea.
You're missing the point: it's not the platform, it's the apps.
While the Flash plugin was never great, there's a reason Flash lived for so long -- fantastic authoring tools. Drag-and-drop GUIs, full featured IDEs, etc. made it a snap to build great looking Flash apps.
Until HTML5 has equivalent authoring tools, it's not truly going to be able to replace Flash.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You know what does NOT suck for games? Building games for the platform you are running on.
Even though Flash on mobile supported games, not every game made sense when many relied on a keyboard and/or mouse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree, but many sites still use it, unfortunately. Those sites will become unavailable if Flash is removed on mobile devices.
No, they are available today.
Thanks to iOS devices, for a few years now pretty much any Flash site you can think of has in fact worked fine without Flash. You just don't know it because by default they give you Flash if you can.
Pretty much only Flash game sites remain as things that cannot easily be transitioned to running wholly without Flash, but in case you had not noticed a lot of popular Flash games are also available as native apps.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
you need WebGL to get any useful level of graphics performance, and Microsoft have no plans to support that in IE.
WebGl sound much better already!
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
India celebrates it's Independence day on 15th Aug!
Android celebrates it's Independence from flash on 15th Aug!
There is a "next" button at the bottom of the screen.
Which shows only 15 games on the second page and six on the third, bringing the total to 36. That's one for each Latin letter (A-Z) and each decimal digit (0-9). Back to Alphanumericville, AC!
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7116/7789557264_e19779cc62_o.jpg
[The iPlayer app] refuses to run on 3G connections ( to save us from ourselves, apparently ) and which can't be put into the background ( e.g. to listen to the radio whilst browsing ).
How much of this is imposed by the copyright owners that license their works to the BBC? As for no 3G, a copyright owner may have licensed exclusive "mobile rights" to someone else. As for pausing in the background, there's a reason that record labels sell movie soundtracks for a higher price than the movie itself: the market has shown itself willing to pay more for background listening than for foreground viewing.
this is 2012.
And in 2012, mobile data plans still tend to have single digit GB per month caps.
Takes no time at all over 4G.
Except the time it takes to work to earn money to pay the cell phone company for the overage. Doesn't 4G stand for "around 4 gigabytes per month", in practice even if not officially? If you want to rasterize all vector animations to video, then why not rasterize all web pages to JPEGs and send those instead of HTML? And why send archives as tar.gz instead of plain tar or zip with deflate instead of zip with store?
Why? Because he scored an exclusive on a platform that everybody has known is dying for years? Because his efforts to secure that exclusive hastened the death of Flash by making it run only on some phones and a tablet that very few people own?
Yes and in exchange you now have entire proprietary closed system (iOS) and since that was victorious, everyone else is looking to do the same.
Joys...
Death of Flash was probably the worst thing to happen in the computing world in the past 10 years.
It also works on 4.1, though you have to side-load it.
I installed from APK on my Nexus. My browser settings are "tap-to-use" so flash content doesn't show immediately by default, but it lets me browse sites with embedded flash videos etc when there's something I actually want to see.
Right now, Adobe has to pay to develop Flash/Flex/ActionScript. Now all you open source fans will develop HTML5 for them, and they need only sell their tools to the mindless masses.
The strategy is economically smart, prestige wise stupid, and strategy wise foolish.
They should have simply opened up Flash, built a better method of ActionScript to communicate with the DOM. And pushed AS3.0 as a strongly typed alternative to JavaScript.
Open sourced, and enough would have continued carrying Flash forward for them, freely. And likely improved it.
Adobe has spoken: Stop deploying Flash altogether.
"Kill the Flash, spill its blood, kill the Flash spill its blood, kill the Flash spill its blood ... "
God, how I allways hate the half-assed Flash discussions on /.
I'm wondering why they don't FOSS it if they plan to let it die.
Anyway, they missed a great opportunity when they could have lead the entire touch interface craze it they'd sought to keep Flash up to date in that respect.
I will miss Flash and AS3. In terms of UI and Rich Client development its a step backwards - by a decade. A shame, really.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Finaly Adobe is contributing and killing Flash. And itself too, hopefully!
For trying to put your own thoughts of what people should do with their OWN device and for the fanboys to agree with their yes man mentality.
Thank you Adobe for not standing your ground and turning into a quivering mess and listening to that tripe.
If I want flash on my device, I should be able to do it and have no limitations on what someone else thinks.
Thank fuck I do not have an iPad or iPhone, avoid that shit like the plague due to actions like this, their entire approach to customers regarding the app store etc.
I do have a MAC Mini and an iPod classic since these devices give me flexibility and do not force me to listen to their crap. But the downside is the iTunes integration, at least there are choices.
Steve jobs told you years ago it was a waste but you complained like little babies.
Had you been using Apple products you would have been ahead of the curve instead of using outdated and insecure products on your wannabe Apple products. Who knows, in another 5 years maybe your android products will be comparable to last years Apple stuff.
Hopefully this will kill off those obnoxious Flash based web sites that tell you right from the front page you can't access them since you don't have Flash installed. Our ISP is one of these. What they don't get is Flash doesn't run on all computers and Flash is a horrible CRU hog. They need to stick with HTML.
I'm in danger of not being able to watch all my old downloaded Odd Todd cartoons and Frog in a Blender / Hamster in a Microwave games on my new Samsung phone!!!!!!
Oh No!!!!!!
When will companies learn to stop copying Apple features on Android?
They're clearly violating the Apple patent on "enhancing user experience by removing functionality".
First of all, Flash on mobile is not dead. It continues on in the form of AIR, with much of same API, along with the addition of new accelerated GPU APIs (Stage 3D and frameworks built upon it such as Starling). What has been killed is the Flash Player plugin for Android web browsers.
Apple killed the Flash Player browser plugin on iOS, but what killed it on Android? Legacy content and the support required to sustain it.
Flash Player, and the legacy content developed for it, is optimized for running on desktop CPUs. It is based on scalable 2D vector graphics, not bitmaps, with the pixel-perfect layout demanded by graphic designers and a high level object-oriented display list rendering architecture. While desktop GPU shaders can now be programmed to render this sort of content efficiently, in the beginning it involved CPU-intensive tessellation of free-form strokes into triangles, with resulting pixel inaccuracies, as well as wide variations in hardware capabilities and two major competing accelerated APIs (D3D and OpenGL with all the various texture extensions).
There was not really much of a performance advantage in rendering 2D scalable vector graphics on the desktop GPU, and a lot of headache. The major performance feature that Flash adopted for desktop GPUs was the cached bitmap.
With the advent of the mobile web, the first response was Flash Lite, a stripped down version of Flash Player that was adequate for rendering the limited content of web sites designed for mobile browsers. But the subsequent arrival of smart phones capable of browsing the full web meant that the complete Flash Player needed to be ported to those platforms, and all the legacy content developed for Flash Player needed to run well there.
On smart phones there is no choice when it comes to rendering graphics: you have to use the GPU in order to cut down on battery consumption and to get any reasonable graphics performance. This was fine for apps designed with mobile graphics in mind, but for legacy Flash content designed around 2D vector graphics it was a disaster.
Add to this the fragmentation of the Android platform, the varying graphics support provided by the different SoCs, the generally crappy drivers, along with Google changing the video rendering architecture and the browser's OpenGL rendering model with each rev of Android from Froyo to Gingerbread to ICS, and the result was a complete fail for the Flash Player browser plugin.
So the response was to stanch the bleeding in the Flash runtime and QE teams by killing the Flash Player plugin, and along with that, any support for legacy Flash vector graphics on mobile web browsers. AIR was designed to remove the decades of cruft that made Flash Player so bad and provides a new graphics API, Stage 3D, optimized for the operations that mobile GPUs are particularly good at: shoving pixels around and manipulating textures at the shader level.
At some point old APIs just have to die, but it's always controversial. The Wayland vs. X11 wars come to mind here.
I agree that Canvas would be more appropriate. What authoring tool do you recommend for animations for "a HTML5 dynamic canvas with JavaScript animation"?
I'm not a fan of flash, but needed something to tide me over until everyone gets changed over to HTML5, or whatever it is were all going to change to...
It actually seems to work fairly well on my Nexus 7. Better (more stable) than on my Atrix 4G, XYBoard, or regular Linux bases desktops. So far anyway.
Flash was all about ads, video, video ads, and ad videos.
I'm sorry your platform was perverted in that way. But it was.
there was a genuine feeling that Flash could actually take on Java as a web runtime
Well, IMHO, it succeeded at that...but that was the wrong target to be aiming at.
I humbly disagree that all the functionality can be replaced easily with html5. Action-script(AS) was pretty powerful in my opinion. There are many live streaming sites out there today that highly depend on flash/AS like earthcam, live chat rooms (some), & web games. Yes most of this stuff can be rewritten (and re-factored to perform better), but web sites certainly are not going to make any big changes before 8/15. I bet there's a bunch of companies that bought into the Adobe sales pitch that there would be cross-campability by implementing a flash solution. Boy, I bet those CIOs are really disappointed. Flash licenses arent cheap either. On a personal note, I was really considering the Samsung Galaxy Note b/c of the upper-end hardware specs of cpu & gpu. Oh well, back to conforming to Iphone/IOS!
How soon can I get rid of it?
As more people move to using tablets and other mobile devices, mainly due to both cost and convenience, content that can't be accessed from them is going to become less and less wanted or usefull.
I already had to download an unofficial version of 32bit flash because the 64bit version they pushed me crashed browsers immediately. I left it broken for at least 2 weeks, uninstalled it for at least 2 weeks and searched for alternatives (without h264 support, you still really need flash to view youtube), finally broke down and reinstalled the old version I downloaded from a sketchy "oldversions" website.
My point being it's been broken at least a month and they know about it. If they can't fix it then they might as well shut it down, and this is the WINDOWS version.. the only one they're still putting out updates for.. they pretty much gave up on linux, gave up completely on mobile, so what direction are they planning on taking?
I don't welcome this. I've backed it up to my SD card
One good thing, however, is that the BBC will have to make an iPlayer app
"But there's already an iPlayer app!"
No there isn't. It's just a shortcut to open the browser to BBC iPlayer's site
Fine by me because anything that makes Adobe have less market share is a step in the right direction. I am sick of dealing with uneditable, unreachable text locked away inside PDFs and the crappy you-will-sit-and-watch brain dead Flash "movies" that everyone thinks I have the time to sit through and worst of all, Flash-based websites that send me and my wallet packing with some message about how I need to download Flash or Shockwave or whatever, rather than just showing me what I came for, again because some misguided "creative type" (in which I count myself thank you) wanted to turn their brochure site into a Peabody Award winner in the category of "Groovy Page Transitions and Indecipherable Navigational Cues"
A Flash-less Android experience? How much to get a ticket to that concert?
Nice analysis +1. AI still hate the lock-in Adobe shit represents though
The hell is wrong with tech reporting? I mean, the headline is everywhere. ANDROID WON'T HAVE FLASH ANYMORE. When in reality what is going on is that Adobe is dropping the support on many platforms. Because of a deal WITH GOOGLE that allows to do it without regret . Thanks to their deal to make google support flash using the pepper API, adobe can stop supporting flash in all these platforms, it is cheaper for them. Meanwhile, the flash pepper plugin that will be a part of google chrome will be the new way to run latest flash in all these devices, including Android. (Happened with Linux/GNU already)
Unfortunately, web animation is collateral damage.
How do you recommend repairing this damage?