Adobe to respond to Apple by giving employees Android phones with Flash - Page 3

Originally Posted by Quadra 610

It no longer matters what Adobe does.

Originally Posted by rexbinary

Hey I found this Android phone running Flash in a bar. Anyone want to buy it?

Originally Posted by gwklam

so you mean you are willing to throw away photoshop, indesign, illustrator updates and go back to stuff like Corel or Gimp? lol.
or if you are just referring to flash, then you are also aiding the death of firefox, opera or any crazy browser that still doesnt have support for the h264 codec. even if its not just about flash video, flash 10.1 has proved to be much more faster and efficient than html5. the only other problem with flash now is that there are too many people using flash that are doing stupid things with it(i'm not one of them, i optimize my flash projects very well and make sure that it uses as little cpu as much as possible while achieving a WOW experience to the user.)

Originally Posted by anantksundaram

Perhaps the one good outcome of this will be at all of Adobe will now collectively see what a resource- and battery-hogging piece of software this is on mobile phones..

Mozilla’s European president, Tristan Nitot, whether Firefox for mobile could ever grace the iPhone, and he straight out crushed our hopes and dreams of a rival for mobile Safari.

“The issue is more with Apple than with us because they control the App Store and because they refuse applications which compete with something that is already on the phone. It’s unlikely that we’ll see a version of Firefox running on the iPhone,” he told us.

Firefox 4: first look!

Mozilla’s so sure the iPhone is a dead end that it’s not even looking into developing a version just in case, he continued: “We’re not investing time and energy in this direction because we’re pretty sure it would be blocked by Apple, so we’re better off using our time in terms of development to do things on open platforms”.

Originally Posted by cnocbui

What evidence is there that HTML5 works on phones and is not a battery hog?

Tests of computers running Flash and HTML5 showed that there was no significant advantage to HTML5 over Flash 10.1. They couldn't even test HTML5 under Safari on a Windows machine because it wouldn't run.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._new_tests.php

I think Adobe is right about hardware acceleration. Apple won't allow anyone but themselves, access to HW acceleration on the iPhone or iPad, so even if HTML5 becomes ubiquitous, only Safari will run it well, Firefox and any other browser on those platforms will probably never perform any better with HTML5 than if they were running Flash - presuming Apple would allow them on, which is very unlikely.

I don't believe Steve Jobs' disingenuous utterances on this topic where they concern performance, he has another agenda entirely.

Originally Posted by gwklam

so you mean you are willing to throw away photoshop, indesign, illustrator updates and go back to stuff like Corel or Gimp? lol.
or if you are just referring to flash, then you are also aiding the death of firefox, opera or any crazy browser that still doesnt have support for the h264 codec. even if its not just about flash video, flash 10.1 has proved to be much more faster and efficient than html5. the only other problem with flash now is that there are too many people using flash that are doing stupid things with it(i'm not one of them, i optimize my flash projects very well and make sure that it uses as little cpu as much as possible while achieving a WOW experience to the user.)

Originally Posted by edelbrp

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.

Originally Posted by ncee

I'm guessing there is a ton of money in this debate for Abobe, why else put some much negative effort into something, that appears to be heading out the door?

Originally Posted by JavaCowboy

One thing that Flash does is help keep Linux available as a desktop computing option. All web content is available to Linux users in part thanks to Flash.

If that content switches to HTML 5 and H.264, then Linux users won't be able to view it with an open-source browser. The only option would conceivably be Google Chrome, once that version comes out of beta for Linux.

Originally Posted by alandail

so they admit they don't have flash available for phones yet, just like Steve said?

Originally Posted by ogmudbone

I have owned the original iPod touch 1g, an iPhone 2g, and an iPhone 3GS. Back in November I was able to sell my iPhone 3GS to a friend and pick up a Motorola Droid. I now use the Skyfire browser on Android 2.1, which can take flash videos and convert them to HTML 5 viewable in the browser. This really works well and I should be able to get 2.2 with actual flash support by the end of summer. Although I'll probably just disable it, however its good to have it when needing to view a flash page.

This is the main problem with the iPhone platform. Apple doesn't give it's users enough choices. As a former iPhone user, I wouldn't like being spoon feed the "correct" software from Apple. HTML 5 is a great video standard but does not replace all the features of flash. And you can support HTML 5, like Google, while also allowing flash players on your mobile platform. Apple should of allowed a flash player to be installed through an app, and if costumers thought is was buggy or drained their battery life they wouldn't have to use it.

The openness of Android is great, but also a weakness as stability and seamlessness is not quite the same as the iPhone platform. However the amount of control Apple keeps over the OS only hinders its growth and development. To me the iPhone is still only and iPod while my android device is more a computer. If Apple opens up and give more developer freedom, and more aggressively updates the iPhone's hardware, it could really be a great proprietary competitor to android. Until then I think Android is really the superior platform as Apple simply cannot keep up with the innovation of multiple companies producing handsets for android. Apple really needs give their customers what they want, not tell them what they want, then maybe my next phone will be another iPhone.

Originally Posted by iGrumble

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.

Originally Posted by chronster

People keep using this as a talking point, as if it's got such an eye opening message about this whole situation. Flash is in development, and Steve Jobs is flat out saying he doesn't want it on his device, all before he's even seen it work.

So the point is simple: While people think it's some amazing point to make that there isn't a device with flash yet, they completely fail to see the irony in that Steve Jobs has no problem dismissing it entirely when HE HASN'T SEEN IT WORK. He simply says he doesn't even want them to even develop for it.

Originally Posted by chronster

Adobe giving away Android devices with flash to their employees sends a message: They've got it working and can't wait to show Steve Jobs is wrong.

Originally Posted by Eriamjh

Why would an Adobe employee tell its own employer how much their products stinks (if it does)?

Originally Posted by JavaCowboy

One thing that Flash does is help keep Linux available as a desktop computing option. All web content is available to Linux users in part thanks to Flash.

If that content switches to HTML 5 and H.264, then Linux users won't be able to view it with an open-source browser. The only option would conceivably be Google Chrome, once that version comes out of beta for Linux.

Originally Posted by ogmudbone

This is the main problem with the iPhone platform. Apple doesn't give it's users enough choices. As a former iPhone user, I wouldn't like being spoon feed the "correct" software from Apple. HTML 5 is a great video standard but does not replace all the features of flash. And you can support HTML 5, like Google, while also allowing flash players on your mobile platform. Apple should of allowed a flash player to be installed through an app, and if costumers thought is was buggy or drained their battery life they wouldn't have to use it.

The openness of Android is great, but also a weakness as stability and seamlessness is not quite the same as the iPhone platform. However the amount of control Apple keeps over the OS only hinders its growth and development. To me the iPhone is still only and iPod while my android device is more a computer. If Apple opens up and give more developer freedom, and more aggressively updates the iPhone's hardware, it could really be a great proprietary competitor to android. Until then I think Android is really the superior platform as Apple simply cannot keep up with the innovation of multiple companies producing handsets for android. Apple really needs give their customers what they want, not tell them what they want, then maybe my next phone will be another iPhone.

Originally Posted by chronster

People keep using this as a talking point, as if it's got such an eye opening message about this whole situation. Flash is in development, and Steve Jobs is flat out saying he doesn't want it on his device, all before he's even seen it work.

So the point is simple: While people think it's some amazing point to make that there isn't a device with flash yet, they completely fail to see the irony in that Steve Jobs has no problem dismissing it entirely when HE HASN'T SEEN IT WORK. He simply says he doesn't even want them to even develop for it.


Adobe giving away Android devices with flash to their employees sends a message: They've got it working and can't wait to show Steve Jobs is wrong.

Adobe plans to formally introduce Flash 10.1 for Android at Google's I/O conference in May. Google also reportedly has plans to give every attendee either a Motorola Droid or a Nexus One, two high-profile handsets running Android.

Originally Posted by chronster

People keep using this as a talking point, as if it's got such an eye opening message about this whole situation. Flash is in development, and Steve Jobs is flat out saying he doesn't want it on his device, all before he's even seen it work.

So the point is simple: While people think it's some amazing point to make that there isn't a device with flash yet, they completely fail to see the irony in that Steve Jobs has no problem dismissing it entirely when HE HASN'T SEEN IT WORK. He simply says he doesn't even want them to even develop for it.


Adobe giving away Android devices with flash to their employees sends a message: They've got it working and can't wait to show Steve Jobs is wrong.

Originally Posted by gwklam

so you mean you are willing to throw away photoshop, indesign, illustrator updates and go back to stuff like Corel or Gimp? lol.
or if you are just referring to flash, then you are also aiding the death of firefox, opera or any crazy browser that still doesnt have support for the h264 codec. even if its not just about flash video, flash 10.1 has proved to be much more faster and efficient than html5. the only other problem with flash now is that there are too many people using flash that are doing stupid things with it(i'm not one of them, i optimize my flash projects very well and make sure that it uses as little cpu as much as possible while achieving a WOW experience to the user.)

Originally Posted by Shrike

You think you really know what customers want? You know what you want, but you think you know what everyone else wants, as a whole?

So, the basic trade off with Android is that it allows users to do more things like Skyfire, lots of Google services, and other things like that, but also will have less stability and seamlessness. How do you know customers would value stability and seamlessness less than the things that the iPhone doesn't have?

That's the bet isn't it. Apple is betting that mainstream customers will value the benefits of Apple's walled garden over the "wild west" of Google's Android, all other things being equal. It's clear in Apple's marketing that battery life, ease-of-use, stability, elegance, and lots of apps is what they think customers want. We'll see how it goes.

And Apple will be fine with yearly update cycles. The semiconductor industry moves on 12 to 18, perhaps 24, month cycles. They are fine as long as they always update to next-gen components on a yearly basis. It'll be the typical ebb and flow. They'll have leading hardware the first 6 months, trailing hardware the next 6 months.

What they are currently missing is a sub $100 subsidizing product that they actually can market (the 8GB iPhone 3G seems more like an experiment to me). I don't think they can really do that and have a iPod nano like successful prodcut until they can convince a carrier to sell iPad-like service plans: $20/month for 1 GB/month or data plans that are contract fee, such as the $15/month for 250 MB/month, and a reduction in voice minute costs (300 min/month for $20/month). As long as data plans are $30/month on contract and voice plans are $40/month, every device is basically on level ground.

Originally Posted by ogmudbone

Customers should have a choice to install flash so those who would like flash can, and those who don't want to risk stability or battery life can choose not to.

But is flash buggy? Does it drain battery life? Or does Apple just want to close a potential back door to the App Store? We can't tell for sure unless it is actually made available for the phone, then customers can decide for themselves. Apple should not restrict features and development for the iPhone platform, its just letting competitors like android catch up.

Originally Posted by ogmudbone

Customers should have a choice to install flash so those who would like flash can, and those who don't want to risk stability or battery life can choose not to. But is flash buggy? Does it drain battery life? Or does Apple just want to close a potential back door to the App Store? We can't tell for sure unless it is actually made available for the phone, then customers can decide for themselves. Apple should not restrict features and development for the iPhone platform, its just letting competitors like android catch up.

Originally Posted by ogmudbone

I have owned the original iPod touch 1g, an iPhone 2g, and an iPhone 3GS. Back in November I was able to sell my iPhone 3GS to a friend and pick up a Motorola Droid. I now use the Skyfire browser on Android 2.1, which can take flash videos and convert them to HTML 5 viewable in the browser. This really works well and I should be able to get 2.2 with actual flash support by the end of summer. Although I'll probably just disable it, however its good to have it when needing to view a flash page.

This is the main problem with the iPhone platform. Apple doesn't give it's users enough choices. As a former iPhone user, I wouldn't like being spoon feed the "correct" software from Apple. HTML 5 is a great video standard but does not replace all the features of flash. And you can support HTML 5, like Google, while also allowing flash players on your mobile platform. Apple should of allowed a flash player to be installed through an app, and if costumers thought is was buggy or drained their battery life they wouldn't have to use it.

The openness of Android is great, but also a weakness as stability and seamlessness is not quite the same as the iPhone platform. However the amount of control Apple keeps over the OS only hinders its growth and development. To me the iPhone is still only and iPod while my android device is more a computer. If Apple opens up and give more developer freedom, and more aggressively updates the iPhone's hardware, it could really be a great proprietary competitor to android. Until then I think Android is really the superior platform as Apple simply cannot keep up with the innovation of multiple companies producing handsets for android. Apple really needs give their customers what they want, not tell them what they want, then maybe my next phone will be another iPhone.

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

Adobe to respond to Apple by giving employees Android phones with Flash

Originally Posted by ogmudbone

I have owned the original iPod touch 1g, an iPhone 2g, and an iPhone 3GS. Back in November I was able to sell my iPhone 3GS to a friend and pick up a Motorola Droid. I now use the Skyfire browser on Android 2.1, which can take flash videos and convert them to HTML 5 viewable in the browser. This really works well and I should be able to get 2.2 with actual flash support by the end of summer. Although I'll probably just disable it, however its good to have it when needing to view a flash page.

This is the main problem with the iPhone platform. Apple doesn't give it's users enough choices. As a former iPhone user, I wouldn't like being spoon feed the "correct" software from Apple. HTML 5 is a great video standard but does not replace all the features of flash. And you can support HTML 5, like Google, while also allowing flash players on your mobile platform. Apple should of allowed a flash player to be installed through an app, and if costumers thought is was buggy or drained their battery life they wouldn't have to use it.

The openness of Android is great, but also a weakness as stability and seamlessness is not quite the same as the iPhone platform. However the amount of control Apple keeps over the OS only hinders its growth and development. To me the iPhone is still only and iPod while my android device is more a computer. If Apple opens up and give more developer freedom, and more aggressively updates the iPhone's hardware, it could really be a great proprietary competitor to android. Until then I think Android is really the superior platform as Apple simply cannot keep up with the innovation of multiple companies producing handsets for android. Apple really needs give their customers what they want, not tell them what they want, then maybe my next phone will be another iPhone.

Originally Posted by masternav

See you are exactly missing the consumer POV - and using your geek POV instead. Apple has the market proof that the average consumer doesn't care about openness, control, rabid innovation, and multiple hardware platforms. Consumers want that stability and seamlessness that you dismiss so lightly, they are willing to trade the rabid innovation for careful and calculated innovation on a longer time-scale. In fact if you took the time to move out of your geeky milieu and talk to the average consumer you would find that they are not entirely comfortable with Apple doing YEARLY updates to the hardware! Apple is giving their customers substantially what they want - you just aren't an Apple customer - and that's OK.

Android will be fantastic for the the geeks and bloggers and wannabe geeks to play around with and mess up and jail-break and load any old software on. Android won't be the superior platform until it can address the average consumer needs of stability and seamlessness together with all the geek qualities that you love so dearly. When Android commands a parity marketshare with the iPhone, that is when you can say that Android is, in fact a superior platform.

Originally Posted by ogmudbone

The same could be said about macs in the 90s, it turned out consumers moved on the the cheaper and more quickly evolving windows computers. Also a lot of what you would call non tech-savy consumers base their purchases on recommendations by knowledable friends. The iPhone came out when the market was ruled by blackberries, but because of RIM's lack of innovation the iPhone took a good portion of the market share. The same thigh is happening now with apple. Denying flash support and other developemets have only left a huge hole for android to take advantage of. Flash could easily be made avaliable through and app, and for those who choose not to download it, their user experiance would of been complety uneffected. By completely banning flash, apple risks losing the "geeks" who have been premoting their product the entire time. Most normal "consumers" when buying a high end device such as a smart phone will base their decicions on what more tech savvy people recommended. It used to be the iPhone, but if apple keeps intentionaly hindering its development, both the "geeks" and the consumers will move on to a platform that will give them much more. Currently that platform is android and so far it has offered a lot of things apple has denied on the iPhone.

That said android is open source, which does have it weaknesses. I think apple has the biggest opertunity to create a killer proprietary phone OS to really dominate the market like windows Sid for PC's (except work better of course), but they need to loosen their control a little.

Originally Posted by Joe Kool

Sold my iphone and bought a Nexus one, best upgrade ever. It's only a matter of time before people realise there are much better alternatives to the iphone.

Originally Posted by Qualia

Here's the thing: the "geeks" have ALWAYS hated the iPhone: they complained about the lack of a removable battery, lack of multitasking, lack of Flash (even though no other phone has had it), etc. since it was released. Either the layman consumer does not blindly follow the recommendations of the tech community or there's a much bigger demographic of us Apple nerds within it. The iPad received even more scorn than the iPhone did, and it's doing quite well too.

Wasn't this same argument made for Linux as well? "My family and friends will eventually use Linux because I'm the computer guy and I recommend it; therefore, Microsoft is doomed!"

Consumers don't care how open a platform is for developers; they don't care about licenses; they don't even care about Flash. What most consumers want is a product that works and does everything they need it to do. If what they want can be done without Flash, most will not care, and many will not even notice its absence.

I do think history will repeat itself, but it will not be the failure of the Mac, but the success of the iPod, which has also received plenty of scorn from the tech community since its inception.