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Adobe Officially Kills New Flash Installations On Android

Posted by Unknown on from the ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead dept.

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."

14 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Good riddance. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Good riddance. by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Good riddance. by Desler · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    3. Re:Good riddance. by bluescrn · · Score: 5, Informative

      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)

    4. Re:Good riddance. by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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

    5. Re:Good riddance. by dmt0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:Good riddance. by jeremyp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
  2. Die flash die! by onyxruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  3. Strange direction by sl4shd0rk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!
    1. Re:Strange direction by Artraze · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...)

  4. Re:VM within VM within VM. by ciderbrew · · Score: 5, Funny

    Silverlight?

  5. Re:I wonder how many fools.. by Desler · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. grab a copy now? (is it possible) by neurocutie · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  7. Re:Adobe Edge by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

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