Adobe to respond to Apple by giving employees Android phones with Flash - Page 2

Flash users are their bread-and-butter; the Flash plugin is not. The users don't have to like it, they just have to have it. It's like banner ads: AppleInsider (in this case) is selling a certain amount of your field-of-view for a certain amount of time to, presumably, some kind of advert service, and they also are selling your eye-time to advertisers, then you have an advertising designer who will presumably will be trying to create a high view-to-click rate, and then the business being advertised, which really only cares about the clicks. In the same way, Adobe sell potential users to developers, developers try to convert those potential users to actual users (by making an attractive and usable interface, hopefully), and sell those actual users on to the client business. You only have to be a potential user (ie be exposed to the content but not necessarily do anything with it) as far as Adobe is concerned.

I agree that the iPad will push businesses to have web sites which are accessible without Flash (as clearly is the case for some of the iPad apps available at launch!); however, I suspect that in the case of the iPhone, although it does a very good job of not compromising on web browsing, people still think you can't get web sites rendering correctly on mobile phones (maybe just due to the small screen size) and so aren't that bothered when their site doesn't work on there because they believe the same kinds of problems will plague their non-Flash-using competition.

Silverlight is nothing but a half-hearted attempt to kill Flash, and Microsoft's motivation in that will be similar to Apple's no-Flash-in-the-App-Store stance: Microsoft do not (not AT ALL) want to find themselves in a position where most popular Windows apps are in fact Flash apps which run poorly and effectively destroy (by not making them available to users/developers) all the distinguishing selling features of the Windows platform. In previous attempts to kill a competitor's business (Netscape, Java) Microsoft started with something which was compatible and diverged from there, to considerable initial success. With Silverlight, I think they took NIH too far and failed to get a good foothold because it's not compatible with Flash at all. Because Silverlight doesn't have that big a user base (and a big user base is its main purpose), there's no motivation to put lots of money into making it better, so it wouldn't surprise me if it performs poorly.

I agree. One additional option is that, in the event they don't adequately surmount the issues, internal forces will propose a parallel project to persuade an alternative direction to executive leadership, i.e., HTML5. One that will improve their current strategic business direction and support immediate tactical developer issues. How will today's decisions affect how well they will participate in the future cloud world.

Best post I've seen today! FlashOS would be a hilarious idea, it would be so whooshy. Bluescreen crash messages could slide in from the left and bounce when you tapped them! As for the thin-Flash-wrapper-OS concept, I think that was pretty much the way Sun used to view Java; it does actually make some sense, although Flash would be very poorly suited to such a task. Mainly, though, phone handset makers do like to compete on the behaviour of their main UI, so in that sense it would be unlikely that they would all standardise on any particular underlying UI toolkit.

I may be preaching to the choir here, but I don't get the big deal with having Flash on mobile devices. I was trying to convince some friends that even if you had the option of Flash, you probably would want it disabled. Security, resource hogging and stability issues are a given. But perhaps more importantly is *how* Flash is used on the web:

1) Video. Almost all video uses some sort of Flash player. Some articles continue to tout that since 90% of video uses Flash, it therefore won't work on mobile devices without Flash. I did some testing on my iPhone and was pleasantly surprised to find that all the video sites I could think of simply work great on the phone as it downgraded gracefully to a native format that uses hardware decoding.

2) Flash ads. OK, Flash ads suuuck! Boy they are annoying. Enough said.

3) Site navigations. How do you hover to drop down a menu on a touch interface? You can't. Pretty much all decent sites that use Flash navs fall back to conventional navs when Flash isn't available, which is perfect for mobile devices.

4) Games. Most of the better Flash games have free, native app-store equivalents which run better than the Flash version. Games requiring pointers and keyboards to interact would be awkward on a mobile device.

Being a developer, I totally see Jobs' point about not wanting a third party middleware shoe horned into the development environment. Something some folks don't understand is that Flash wouldn't be an alternative to Apple's APIs, it goes on top of it. So as Apple adds features, a Flash developer would have to be at the mercy of Adobe to provide an update to pass that feature through. Lastly, knowing Adobe's track record of security and stability problems with Flash, you know they will have to issue important updates down the road. What would happen to all those apps approved before that update? Would Apple have to pull hundreds/thousands of apps each time an update is issued so the developer can rebuild their app and resubmit it? What about people who already bought those apps? It would be a mess.

One last point. I think it's smart to not even offer the *option* of Flash for a couple reasons: First of all, if its anything like how it works on OS-X, it will crash occasionally and then users will complain and blame Apple. Crashing on a laptop is one thing, but crashing on a mobile device can be especially frustrating. Also, if Flash were optional, it would give developers an excuse for not making native versions of content. So you'd see things like "enable Flash to continue" which would be lame. Don't even make it an option unless it is really going to be 100% useful and stable.

OK, that's my rant I've used on my Android friends. :') Interestingly, they really still want the option of Flash even if the experience may suck. For a while I was in the same boat, but for the reasons outlined above, I think even having the option of something half-baked would be bad news.

Adobe + Google is going to end up in disaster for Adobe eventually. Right now, Google tolerates Adobe and is accepting of this marriage of convenience until they can push Apple's post-PC plans back. Or that Apple brings HTML5 to fruition over the Internet, and they know they've lost.

When either of those happens, Google is going to knife Adobe in the back by abandoning it, if not, downright nailing the last nails in the coffin by the "do no evil" clause, which Google is doing by supporting a proprietary platform (which doesn't belong to Google).

Adobe, you had to have known this when you started to have platform aspirations with Flash/Flex/Air, that you were going to have big boy battles with no friends behind your back. You encroached on MS's turf. You encroached on the "open" web turf. You encroach upon Apple's turf. I must believe you have some plan to knife Google in the back if and when the time comes.

Well, if you can't sell them, why not.

Free Android phone running Flash? Sounds more like punishment to me, but whatever.

What a brilliant 'take' on this story! If only it were true! I think more likely it's called, 'unintended consequences!'

When Adobe's CEO is fired, you should apply for the job!

Our broker had a 'web based back office' website designed for our 5,000 agents and it uses Flash extensively....

I couldn't believe at its inception...the first thing we were told was make sure we turned off our 'Pop-up blocker!' What a step backwards! I use a Mac/Safari but I would say 99% of the agents use Windows/IE6. Is there anything more annoying on the internet than 'pop-up' advertising? Sheez!

Also, because of Flash, once you have opened the back office there is no way to 'cut and paste' the nine digit account numbers...so every subject in your email or anything that requires the account number has to be typed-in instead of the much easier, time saving 'copy & paste!' (Can't use copy & paste! Why wasn't this brought during the testing phase...oh, let's just stick it in a capsule and label it 1985!)

i hate opening the website because of this and therefore I don't really update it or for that matter, use it in my day to day business because of Flash! What a waste of money and resources!

Anyone wanna take bets on which will come first... Flash on Android or FlashBlock for Android?

Yeah, I use ClickToFlash, mainly for the reasons you'd expect, although with the pleasant side-effect that Flash files which would automatically play audio content (usually with video) no longer interrupt my web surfing.


It's not really relevant, that 90% is just statistics being akin to "damned lies". All that matters is whether the videos that the user actually watches work - it's not like people google for "video" and then start clicking links at random. Well, maybe 1% of people do.


The same is often true of animgif ads, and there are plenty of nasty, ugly, or offensive static image ads. Adverts are all about desperately seeking attention, and being obnoxious is a great way to do that. Without Flash, they would just seek another technology to do the same thing.


Essentially there isn't a problem with a small minority of developers using poorly-specified-for-the-platform middleware, and I'm sure that both is and will continue to be the case (eg, people writing C code which uses abstraction layers like SDL). The problem arises when a significant proportion of the developers (and there are a great many Flash developers who would gladly pay $99 for the chance to sell their Flash stuff at 99c a pop) are using the middleware and don't even have the opportunity to mix that with direct use of the underlying frameworks (because their middleware doesn't support any language which can send Objective-C messages). If most of the apps you had on your phone couldn't support the features of your phone's OS until say two years after it was released, that would be pretty much equivalent to not having those features at all. The iPhone OS 4 multitask-via-events system will be a good example of that: if you have a cross-compiled Android audio app on your iPhone, it just won't support multitasking properly (will just pause), and so you'd have little reason to believe that your phone had such a feature.


The same is true of any common libraries at all, although admittedly to a lesser extent. If there was a widespread security problem, Apple could remotely revoke the applications in question, but normally you could expect the same as with desktop applications which have libraries in the bundle: occasional updates purely to update the libraries.


My experience with Android users is that they want all the features possible, even ones that they can't or shouldn't use (root shell access, for example), and that's what attracted them to Android over iPhone OS in the first place. I'm sure some would even get excited over the possibility of ActiveX support!

That's a great story, but I don't think it's reflected in reality. Google's integrating Flash into Chrome will be all about getting rid of Adobe's crappy code (from Google's perspective; I doubt they would bother with something that's fine on its own) while accepting that users actually do currently want to run Flash. Google's interest in Flash on Android will also be strictly pragmatic, just about users' demands. There's no marriage or alliance of any kind there, and in fact I think Chrome was conceived by Google as a way to push modern (eg. HTML5) standard features to Windows users, since Gears was not effective at doing so. If Google were at all interested in courting Adobe, then Google Maps would use Flash.

In fact, at the moment, it's much more the other way around: Adobe doesn't want to risk any browser with more than a few percent market share not having Flash, because then people would be inclined to make their content "backwards compatible" and so lessen the motivation for users to have Flash in the first place. They also desperately want to be competitive in the mobile phone market because that's where the money is nowadays, and if the nigh-omnipresent WebKit on smartphones actually gets people developing major website features in HTML5, then Microsoft will move to implement those features, then content-heavy web sites will start to move to HTML5 and fewer web site developers will need to buy Adobe CS.


That's an excellent example of the kind of problem SJ was alluding to - a normal user trying to paste would just assume that the functionality was broken on their computer. I can't imagine what Adobe's excuse for not building in copy and paste functionality is, but it's probably no more than "we haven't got around to it".

...future Oprah show.

Oprah to audience: "if you look under your chairs, each of you will find a mobile phone running the Google Android OS, along with Adobe Mobile Flash.... So you can enjoy the "complete web" for an entire day, we have also included an extra battery:" *




* Optional [shoulder] carrying-strap available in 2 colors (orange and black)


.

That's what I said. They are developing a working version of Flash for that system, the only mobile OS (I consider symbian a dumb phone OS, even their smartphone variants can only compete with KIN) that actually wants to work with Adobe. Chrome OS is gonna have flash built in I'm assuming so will android once flash for mobile become available.

The reporting in the media regarding the Adobe/Flash issue related to the iPhone - along with message boards - has been atrocious. First of all they have depicted it as "Steve Jobs slams Adobe Flash". He did not "slam" Flash (well maybe it sounded that way in his emailed retort to the issue of Apple ever using Flash} but then he took time to present a very thoughtful, rational and cogent summary of the issues Apple had for Adobe Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Microsoft seems to have recognized that assessment as a fairly accurate description of the issues. Adobe seems to definitely - as do a cadre of Flash developers - believe this is definitely a threat to one of it's major revenue sources for the company and it's livelihood therefore have turned this into a "pissing match" . . . with the media quickly following in their footsteps. It appears that Adobe is doing everything possible to keep this story alive. At this point we should all just ignore their temper tantrum and move on!!

No hands raised.

Ooh aren't you clever.

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Can you list please the reasons why you believe that a Symbian phone cannot be classed as a smartphone?

It no longer matters what Adobe does.

The whole point of this exercise is that Adobe employees will experience all the problems first hand, and rather than ignoring the issues, they will start working on fixes / designing future versions with the needs of touch and mobile in mind. Adobe don't want customers turning off or avoiding Flash. Consumers not using Flash on mobile devices is a serious threat to Adobe's future business.

Except that there are still endless articles blaming Apple. Read the latest NPR article, for example - where not only the journalist, but 2/3 of the responses blame Apple -apparently forgetting that Adobe has not yet released a full version of Flash for ANY smart phone.

You may say it's well know, but Adobe's shills are going a great job of obscuring the facts.

Some have suggested "fixing" flash. Truth is .. it is a pile of bad code slapped together that can't be fixed. It needs to be buried.

Only good Flash is a Dead Flash.

No. The point was to make a PR stunt.

Haven't Adobe employees been using Macs for years? And yet the Flash plug-in has been the majority cause of crashes and security vulnerabilities on the platform. BTW- As far as security issues, guess what the 2nd is? Adobe Acrobat.

You think this isn't propaganda, but rather a serious intent to focus on Adobe's part at a time that just happens to coincide with Jobs' public criticism?

Ummm kay.

Not if you are an Adobe stock holder. :-)

At the end of the day any decision made by a company is driven by the desire to make more money. Killing off Flash and moving to HTML5 might be better for users, but Adobe will make more profits if instead Flash dominates the mobile web. Therefore Adobe will try to push Flash as hard as possible.


Comparing Adobe software with their Windows equivalents I'm starting to believe most Adobe employee's are using Windows PCs.

There might be some PR element to this, but ultimately I believe Adobe realizes they must make Flash better suited for mobile devices or they are going to lose the battle for control of the web. Getting your employees to actively use your software is an important part of making your software better.

Oof, it's the audio that bothers me. Web ads that yell at me "You've Won!" or "HI, I'm Amber!" bug the s**t out of me. I like to listen to iTunes and crank it up, and then later settle down.. relax... surf.. and "HI I'M AMBER!!"


Yeah, well, I have to say as a Linux developer and kernel maintainer from way back when, I love my TiVo. It's Linux based. Do I want root on it? Nope, it's an appliance. Frankly I think of the iPhone and the iPad the same way. They work great as is. They are information appliances that do their job well.

Somehow I doubt anyone would be willing to pay anything for it. So many different types, its a wonder they haven't started giving them away free with a value meal at McDonalds.

Good luck stock holders:

Here we have some reviews of the latest mobile flash on the New HTC Incredible just released Thursday
:

They added: "It's also not clear if this will be a perk."

fixed that for you.

Although I agree with you that most of the coverage has been at the intellectual level of a 14 year old running in from the playground and shouting fight! and then running back out to watch and take bets, I looked at the BBC website and didn't see anything particularly better with its coverage. It didn't actually analyze anything that was said by either party. It just had a few Jobs quotes, followed by Adobe remarks that were mainly he's full of it caliber.

"CONGRATULATIONS! You've won a FREE Nintendo Wii! To claim your free Nintendo Wii just go to..."

"bzzZzzZZzz.. Bzz. BzzzZzz."

Hilarious. That sums it up nicely, though. I don't know any iPhone users who would want an Android OS phone, and vice-versa. They're different OSs for different people.

I don't want flash on my iPhone, if for no reason other than the ads. Even if the UI were 'optimized' for mobile devices, the security issues addressed, and stability problems resolved. We still have those ads.

But I don't understand what Adobe hopes to accomplish by this. Presumably (hopefully) their employees believe in the products they are producing. They shouldn't need convincing. It isn't likely to convince any of us who don't want flash. It's not going to change Apple's stance on this. Jobs has a settled disposition that flash needs to be sunset. I agree. I hate it on computers, and I don't want it on my phone-even as an option.

Well if they want root access, that voids their warranty, just like the iPhone...

And if they don't root their phones, worse yet, they can only run apps written in Java

A Nokia N900 is a better fit for those types of people....and it's had Flash for a lot longer....

Oh, and the Palm Pre...that's also got an easy way to turn on the root shell, no warrany issues either....

I think they only like Android because it's "not Apple"....



Dan

Good one!

uh. The iphones is any better? Sorry Charlie. Own both. Would say the opposite is true.

What a bunch of morons Adobe are.

Pathetic.

Um.....
YouTubes internet video market share is around 75%
I do not used Flash and have no problem watching any video on YouTube.

So, if YouTube has 75% market share, how does Flash have a 90% market share?

Adobe should take WebKit, make a mobile browser for iPhone, have mobile Flash and distribute via Cydia for Jailbroken iPhones.

Adobe has been screwing over users for years doing shit like not updating Camera RAW for older versions of Photoshop. They force you to spend hundres of dollars for the newest Photoshop which becomes obsolete in following years when newer cameras come out.

If Adobe wants to fight Apple they should develop Photoshop for Linux to spank Apple's marketshare for machines out there. Crybaby bitches.