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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).
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Silverlight?
You do realize that Flash videos are just H.264 in MP4, right? It's been this way for years. Almost no one uses Sorenson for Flash video anymore.
The killer feature for Android is that it releases better, faster, and more feature rich phones several times a year.
Actually most Android phones are schlock with low res screens and running ancient Android versions.
You do realize that Flash videos are just H.264 in MP4, right? It's been this way for years. Almost no one uses Sorenson for Flash video anymore.
Right. So exactly why do we need Flash for web video? We don't. It's superfluous. Now it's gone from mobile, we just need to clear it off the rest of the internets.
The Admin and the Engineer
So is it possible to somehow grab a copy of Android Flash now that would be installable in the future?
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.
Will realise they've just cheered away a product that works for one that doesn't.
Flash was shite, it was a slow, buggy, CPU chewing pile of scrotum. I'll be the first to admit that but flash did everything it said on the tin and a bit more. HTML5 at current cant even do what it says on its own tin, let alone half of what was on Flash's tin.
We've traded away a slow, reliable and butt ugly mechanic for a person who cant even tell the difference between a valve and a vagina and people are happy about this.
For crying out loud, we cant even decide on a video codec yet. Google and Apple are pushing their own codec's (for all intents and purposes, Apple just about owns H.264) and I read a few days ago Microsoft is also considering it's own. So we have umpteen versions of HTML5 and risk the net falling back into the dark ages of the Netscape/IE wars again.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Simple: people will continue to produce new HTML5 vector animations and games using Adobe's HTML5 tools.
You seem to be arguing against a point I never tried to make. But for content providers the video streaming framework is still more mature than for HTML5 video. That is why people still use it. My point was only about addressing the complaint of getting rid of Flash meant it was being replaced by H.264, but this is silly since Flash video IS H.264 in almost every case nowadays.
Didn't mean to sound argumentative... was more exuberant. Flash, however, was never needed for what it was used for 99% of the time. Another thread mentioned Black and Tans... so I thought of a terrible metaphor. Flash is like Harp... a decent pale lager, but it becomes exceptional when mixed properly, wrapped, as it were, around Guinness ... which unfortunately for this metaphor can only be vector animation or a web game. So... Adobe says "Hey! What's good for Guiness is good for EVERYTHING! Mix it with your gin! It's a better vermouth! Mix it with your whiskey, it's a better sour!" Trouble is, Harp doesn't mix that well with anything but Guinness, no matter what the bartender says. And eventually, people will start hating Harp... because its just awful when it's used improperly, and unless it's by itself or with Guinness, it's being used improperly. Flash was never intended to be a video wrapper... that was just something that it could do but only did well during the very earliest part of the last decade under special circumstances, before bandwidth was taken for granted. Adobe kept leveraging it for video, however, long after it was reasonable to do so. Eventually, everyone hates Flash and forgets that its actually a decent app platform and wonderful for vector animation. Had Adobe stepped back off pushing it as a video wrapper, for which it is terrible for the extra processing overhead, and left it to find it's true usefulness, perhaps most web users wouldn't despise it.
The Admin and the Engineer
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.
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.
It is amazing isn't it?
Slashdot before Android:Flash sucks, it's closed and proprietary:
Slashdot after Flash was available for Android and not iOS: Flash is great! It lets us view the whole web!
Slashdot after Adobe kills Flash on Android: Flash sucked anyway.
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."
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.
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A restaurant web site works best when it's the 1990s era web site. A single page with the address, a map, the phone number, and hours of operation. Another web page linked from the first that shows their menu. That's all a restaurant needs. It's amazing how many restaurants and other businesses can't even be bother to post their hours of operation on their website, or put their phone number in an easy to find location, preferably on the front page.
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