Adobe rumored to be abandoning work on mobile Flash player - Page 2

There are still voices that Apple could have a Flash at least as an opt-in option. What those guys don't understand is the simple fact that companies and developers are lazy. With Flash "sort of" supported they will have no incentive to move on. The Flash agony would last much longer, at the expense of the end user.
Dropping support entirely sends a clear message: if you want your page viewed from a mobile device, do it right!

There are still dozens of lies about Flash still flying around.
The #1 lie:
Flash on a mobile device gives the end user full web experience. Eeeaah, with a couple of "IFs", like IF the page is acceptably sized for a mobile device, IF the page does not rely on mouse overs (N/A on touch screen device), IF , IF
The #2:
All mobile devices besides iOS based ones always supported Flash.
When the original iPhone came out, there was only "Flash lite" on mobile phones. It was NEVER intended to provide "full web experience", and it didn't. It was merely a programming language to allow Flash developers to write (simple and crippled) apps for those phones. SEVERAL YESARS LATER, Adobe released "real Flash" implementation, which stayed in beta for months, till (the middle of?) this year. All Apple competitors jumped on Flash with the hope that they will sell this crap to the user as "competitive advantage", and that it would somehow compensate for the lack of quality apps and widen the developer support (most notable examples: Xoom and PlayBook).

No surprises here. Anyone who did any crossplatform development, I mean, fat client cross platform C/C++ or Java client-side had no doubts that Flash was tilting at windmills. Every reason that SJ laid out from security to lowest common denominator features were obvious.

We know now a few things.
1)The many Android people who claimed that the Flash worked well were clearly exaggerating. You've just torpedoed your credibility folks.
2) Adobe never delivered a final version BECAUSE they couldn't get it to work well.
3)Control your destiny. The only company who didn't wast time and money on Flash was Apple. RIM doubled down on Flash and now look even more stupid, if that is possible.
4)All of you pundits who berated Apple and Jobs as control freaks ONCE AGAIN showed why Apple is on top and you write about technology. How would you like to have spent millions support something to have the company yank the rug out? See pt 3.
5)Flash did do one thing well. It allowed Android, WebOS and the Playbook to be added to the list of vulnerable Flash operating systems.

But I thought Flash wasn't going anywhere soon? I can't count the number of times I've heard that.

And car companies. Although their sites have improved a lot in recent years.

Actually, Google's purpose, with both Flash and WebM, is to undermine open standards, which they see as a threat to their desire to control various industry sectors.

Flash? Steve who? Looks like its ALL old news now.

Flash works great on the HP Touchpad - ohh, wait.

If this is true, Adobe better prepare for the wrath of the Fandroids.

ran/runs Flash Lite - developed for feature phone internet service, and not full-featured Flash like that supported on the desktop. Flash Lite is not the full Flash Player Adobe was touting as their Flash Mobile implementation, that works so not well on the platforms that tried to use it. It doesn't support the full runtime elements that Adobe attempted in mobile Flash Player.

deleted

I'm pretty sure that was April 2010, not "last April". Just sayin'...

Don't know why AI is slow when it comes to updates considering everyone else got this up, but yes it's official Adobe is focusing on HTML 5

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform...-to-html5.html

They're just temporarily halting development. They've been ordered to first help with the 2,142 more flash virus/trojans discovered over the weekend and then they'll get back to making the perfect conduit for mobile infections and take overs.

+1. Insightful.

Hey, that seems to be more than a vague promise. Good!

Your response is strange. I didn't say Apple just wanted to give Adobe a hard time. I said Steve felt mobile is not proper the place for Flash. And it's not proper for the reasons you mentioned.

Not even being dead can stop Steve from being right I've hated Flash on the PC for over a decade and about the only time I've missed it on my wife's iPad was when I was bored and wanted to play the D&D Facebook game. Hey, it's D&D *grin* It's nice for Adobe to finally admit they couldn't make Flash not suck so it's dead now.

Sorry, but are you insane? Less battery life, constant slowdowns, and application crashes make a better iPhone experience? Flash doesn't add anything good to the mobile experience. Yes we miss the web we are used to, but that is because so much of the web we are used to is based on flash, this must change. Sometimes change hurts, but in the long run the web and mobile experience will be better without Flash.

Steve: 1, Adobe: 0

I can imagine it seemed very strange! My apologies, somehow I quoted you instead of the comment beneath yours. I've corrected it now.

I think the competition element of this was overplayed. Both Apple and Adobe are made up of thousands of employees who can see where the industry is heading. I think it was more to do with timing.

Adobe have obviously invested a lot of resources into providing a plugin to make up for the lack of development in web standards. The problem with it is that because it is controlled by one company and allows content authors an end-to-end service like Apple's (author on Adobe, deploy on Adobe), it could be relied upon and far too many people did.

This led to the point where almost all rich content online was controlled by a single company. If Adobe ever collapsed, there would have been no reliable alternative to do the same job. There's also the reliance on them developing hardware-acceleration support for every device and the more SoC configurations there are, the more it gets out of control.

Moving to open standards benefits Android and Adobe more than anyone. It relieves Adobe of their support headache and it relieves Android users of some performance and battery woes.

I think the difference between Adobe and Apple is that Adobe have a commitment to content creation customers as they depend on them. Apple has a drive to move the technology industry in the right direction and has to do it by force because otherwise it takes too long. Both companies have the same goal but different schedules. Adobe doesn't want to jump before it's safe, Apple understands that people who don't want to jump need to be pushed otherwise they'll take far longer to jump than they need to.

Have you used Flash on Android ever?

I experience none of those things on a Droid over a year old. If I did I would be the first to say it.

It works great for videos. Flash on OS X is probably crappier than on Android. Hey, perhaps now all those programs at Adobe can make flash on OS X stop sucking. So, I win one, I lose one. I'm okay with that! Any other Droid/Mac people have similar feelings on this?

Just wanna say thanks for such a level-headed post!

Timing? Really?

This was competition through and through. Adobe's responses to Steve's open letter were pure outright competitive statements. Adobe was out to prove Steve wrong and it backfired on them.

jmho

They have a common goal but had two different viewpoints about how to get there. What is interesting is the Adobe response from the co-founders actually backs up the HTML 5 route more than the Flash route despite explicitly backing Flash:

http://www.adobe.com/choice/openmarkets.html

Adobe's HTML Edge tool didn't get built overnight though, they have been progressing towards this but it has taken a long time for HTML5 to become viable for deploying to a large customer base. It's actually Microsoft that's held everyone back more than anyone and for Adobe, having a plugin that overrides the browser was the only real option.

When Microsoft released IE9 in March this year, this has at least provided a solid roadmap going forward. Four years ago, Microsoft gave no indication they'd do something like this and even went slightly the other way building Silverlight.

There's no denying there's a competitive element between all the companies involved but they employ some of the best people in their field and these people are very smart and they understand the industry. Sometimes they just end up being wrong, not because their position was wrong or taken for competitive reasons but because they didn't have the initiative or balls to force everyone else to do things the right way like Apple and instead try to hold onto workarounds or stop-gaps that work for the present.

The measure of how competitive this whole thing has been will be evident in how much of a defeat it will have been for the 'losers'. I imagine the Adobe team aren't too upset about not having to figure out how to support a low-level plugin on dozens of vastly different hardware configurations. If Apple really wanted to punish them, they would have let them keep going.