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."

Comments

Good riddance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash has always sucked on mobile. I'm glad Adobe is finally admitting it.

Re:Good riddance.

[ArcherB]

Flash has always sucked on mobile. I'm glad Adobe is finally admitting it.

I agree, but many sites still use it, unfortunately. Those sites will become unavailable if Flash is removed on mobile devices.

Which makes me wonder about the wisdom of this decision. As mobile devices become more popular, website designers are forced to make a choice; keep using Flash and be unavailable on mobile devices or redesign with a switch to something else. Adobe loses either way.

Re:Good riddance.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It seems particularly curious to kill it when they already have(and are ostensibly releasing security updates for, to the degree Adobe ever manages that) Flash 'working' on Android versions up to 4.0

Do they gain something by killing their marketshare faster than they otherwise would through people gradually upgrading? Naively, I would think that they would try to milk the fuck out of that marketshare while they still can, and do some zealous hunting for alternatives.

Re:Good riddance.

[Desler]

Adobe cared about selling the Flash creation tools not the Flash platform itself. They'll just change the tools to export HTML5.

Re:Good riddance.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I suspect that that would be a no-go. They clearly don't much care about whatever pile of hacks and shims and eldrich blasphemy got Flash running on something that wasn't Win32; but I would strongly suspect that cross-platform stuff like, say, their precious little DRM system, that they hope will save them from HTML5 video by ensuring that 'premium content' providers remain loyal, is worth far more to them closed than open.

What surprises me, really, is that Adobe never got Flash to work properly even as the capabilities of handhelds have shot through the roof. Ok, Flash sucks on a 528MHz ARM11 with 192 MB of RAM and a painfully-underpolished Android 1.6 OS. Why does it still suck on systems with 2-4x as many cores(each clocked 2-3x faster and generally based on a more sophisticated ARM flavor), and a GB of RAM?

Re:Good riddance.

[bluescrn]

The thing is, Flash on mobile is very alive. Just not in the web browser.

Look into Flash+AIR, you can build Flash content into mobile apps for iOS and Android, and this support some of the latest+greatest features, such as Stage3D (hardware-accelerated 3D graphics API)

Re:Good riddance.

[h4rr4r]

There is an android youtube app. On top of this youtube supports HTML5, so you don't need flash for it.

Re:Good riddance.

[CohibaVancouver]

Those sites will become unavailable if Flash is removed on mobile devices.

...and tragically, most of them are pr0n.

Re:Good riddance.

[bluescrn]

But you don't 'install AIR'. You install just-another-app, and never know that it's made with Flash (unless you're really looking for it)

Re:Good riddance.

[AuMatar]

Multiple cores isn't going to help, processing is done in a single thread. Nor is more RAM, unless RAM was the problem to begin with. Most likely the bottleneck is the CPU, and I doubt you're really using a 3x faster CPU. Even if you are a 2-3x faster clock doesn't mean running code 2-3x faster- things like cache misses and mispredicted branches don't scale. Also remember that IPC is generally lower on ARM than on comparable x86 chips, so comparing raw numbers isn't that much of a help.

Re:Good riddance.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I have no reason to doubt the power of Adobe's marketing department; but server-side transcoding seems unlikely to be a very lucrative niche. Flash has supported h.264 video for a while now(since somewhere in the 8.x or 9.x window, I think) and much of the 'flash video' on the web, even if it still has a .swf or .flv extension, often turns out to be h.264. In that case, the only change they'll need to make is to the site code: instead of the "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, tell them to go download flash", they'll need "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, HTML5 play".

What will be interesting is if, for those customers who actually use the fancy 'flash video' features(RTMPe, anything DRM related, whatever 'adaptive streaming' sauce Adobe may have offered) will now have the exciting opportunity to purchase the Adobe Video Client SDK for Android in order to build apps to replace their now nonfunctional websites...

Re:Good riddance.

[dmt0]

Simple. Adobe sells content authoring tools. Everyone who writes in flash, has already bought the tools, and the market is saturated. Now is the time to milk all those who are rewriting their flash content into HTML5.

Re:Good riddance.

[mcwop]

Hopefully, that one guy that has designed every restaurant website there is, switches to HTML5 and CSS3.

Re:Good riddance.

[rrohbeck]

Yup. Flash always sucked on low powered CPUs like Atom. It'll consume 20% on a modern fast CPU with accelerated video and if you don't have video acceleration it'll be much higher.
On an Atom Netbook with Intel GMA under Linux it's unusable. I disabled the plugin, downloaded the .flv files and played them with VLC - no problem.

Re:Good riddance.

[jeremyp]

What is this "market" of which you speak? There is no market because Flash Player is given away. There's no money, in fact it is a drain on Adobe's resources.

Adobe makes its money on the content authoring tools. All they need to do is make those tools target HTML5 and H.264 and everything and everybody's happy. They still sell the authoring tools - in fact perhaps they sell more authoring tools - and they've transferred the drain of maintaining the target platform to the browser vendors.

Die flash die!

[onyxruby]

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?

Strange direction

[sl4shd0rk]

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).

Re:Strange direction

[Artraze]

The flash runtime is really only a cost for them: they have to maintain it ('cause it's so secure!), optimize it, and port it to a lot of platforms.

What they make money on is the flash toolkit. Adobe has decided that maintaining the runtime isn't worth is and instead moving their toolkit over to HTML 5 (and continuing along with being able to export video, etc). Really, it's mostly a win for them. They kept going along with the runtime because it did afford them certain benefits, the install base (which they monopolize) in particular... I think I hear it was something like 90% which probably beats HTML 5 by a wide margin. However, they see the writing on the wall: HTML 5 is getting more common and flash player less. They have a mature toolkit and it's time they compete on that alone and stop wasting (excess) resources working on a costly* side project that really only made sense half a decade ago.

(*I mean seriously, in terms of bad PR alone...)

Gordan's alive!

[bullgod]

- Prince Vultan

Re:VM within VM within VM.

[ciderbrew]

Silverlight?

Re:I wonder how many fools..

[Desler]

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.

grab a copy now? (is it possible)

[neurocutie]

So is it possible to somehow grab a copy of Android Flash now that would be installable in the future?

Re:grab a copy now? (is it possible)

[squiggleslash]

Yes: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html

Just to be clear: you'll be able to download them for the foreseeable future. Whether they'll work in future versions of Android remains to be seen.

Flash still unlikely to go away.

[Eravnrekaree]

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.

Re:Adobe Edge

[tepples]

Simple: people will continue to produce new HTML5 vector animations and games using Adobe's HTML5 tools.

Re:I wonder how many fools..

[catmistake]

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.

Re:Hmm...

[Karlt1]

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.