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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'm certain it was Steve Jobs that killed Adobe Flash player on mobile devices a couple years ago.
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...
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
Silverlight?
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?
So is it possible to somehow grab a copy of Android Flash now that would be installable in the future?
HTML5 is terrible at the moment if you want to make games, or do any fancy animation type stuff with it. Even on a high end desktop PC it fairly chugs along, and has a major problem - you need WebGL to get any useful level of graphics performance, and Microsoft have no plans to support that in IE.
This is a really bad day to be working for Kongregate.
'The Silverlight plug-in has crashed'
The most annoying thing about Netflix in a browser...
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.
But Jobs died first. So NO U!
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?
You're at least a year behind; videos that play an ad spot before viewing work fine on HTML5 now, or at least they did on my phone yesterday.
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.
I kinda hope it goes to an app maybe then they will release it on linux too, it would after all only need a recompile if done correctly.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Silverlight is dead. Microsoft has effectively abandoned it.
Sure.
Silverlight is not supported, and will never be supported on any of Microsoft's current or future mobile platforms. (Winphone 7and 8, win8 RT)
Not true. Silverlight works just fine on WP7 and will work just fine on WP8. When building WP7 apps you have 2 choices for a framework, Silverlight or XNA. WP7 apps are forward compatible with WP8.
Silverlight does not work in Metro IE on windows 8, only the desktop version of IE (Trying to watch netflix in win8 was a real eye opener). Silverlight is not a supported development environment/language/framework/whatever for Metro programs at all. (Which is why it only works in the win8 'desktop' environment, which is essentially windows 7 SE) Silverlight isn't even bundled with win8. You have to download it.
Sure, but the code used to build metro apps (yes I know, I'm calling it that anyways) is almost identical to the code used to build Silverlight apps. They are more or less the same thing with a different name.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Netflix on iOS doesn't need much in the way of DRM, though, because there's no way to run another app to capture the stream.
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!
Jailbreak, done.
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.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html
Looking forward, Adobe believes that Flash is particularly suited for addressing the gaming and premium video markets, and will focus its development efforts in those areas. At the same time, Adobe will make architectural and language changes to the runtimes in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes are well placed to enable the richest experiences on the web and across mobile devices for another decade.
what does that mean? it means flash is being used as middleware in game development. other examples of game middleware include the havok physics engine, sundog, RAD, autodesk, the list goes on. i've seen the flash logo in my console games already, in fact more and more as of late.
oh look! here's something from autodesk so you can use flash to make console-quality games for the web - http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/10/autodesk-scaleform-flash-games/. i really wish html5 had rich, mature development tools like flash does. how come autodesk didn't choose html5 for this instead of flash? actually, i know the answer.
adobe killed flash player in android mobile browsers because android is too fragmented to ensure quality. that's from their blog statement. html5 has the same problem, except that it's fragmented by all browsers, and not just mobile ones. if you don't think so, explain why modernizr exists: http://modernizr.com/.
one last thing to rip your stupid viewpoint apart: you hate flash most for the invasive ads? and you think that's flash's fault? you think adobe makes those ads? with html5 being supported to replace flash in the browser, marketers are going to make the same fucking ads that they make now, except they will be built in html5 and you will have a much tougher time blocking those than flash. you're a dumbass.
if you think flash means flash player in the browser only, then you don't know what flash is. you don't know shit.
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
"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!
Since your knowledge of multimedia on the web only seems to extend as far as the deployment of Silverlight, you probably wouldn't know that Flash has been around since '98. I guess a technology that's been around for 14 years is too flash-in-the-pan for a smart developer to work with.
\Maybe you can spend more time with Ruby on Rails, I'm sure that will still be around for the next decade and a half.\
Probably for the same reason they didn't call WPF and Silverlight the same thing, even though they both extremely similar. It's the same technology being leveraged for different purposes.
-1 overrated isn't the same thing as "I disagree".
Wait you're calling people building stuff with flash developers? Really?
Sure I do. For instance, developing educational software, training applications for mechanical/auto (flash is great at 3d and object handling-- perfect for interior vehicle/mechanical interactivity)
Oh yeah-- and games. Unless you don't consider game development to be "real" programming.
Devs use the appropriate tool for the job-- occasionally (not always, I'm not a crazy person) that tool is flash.
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.
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".
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.
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?
Silverlight sucks too. Believe me, I've been developing in it for over a year.
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
Unfortunately, web animation is collateral damage.
How do you recommend repairing this damage?
Yet I still see videos that won't play on my Nexus 7 because they are listed as not available on mobile. What phenomenon am I seeing?
Then just make game that don't support IE, pretty easy. IE is used greatly in corporate enviroments, you won't loose too many users on a non-IE game anyway.