Adobe Officially Kills New Flash Installations On Android 313
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."
Good riddance. (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash has always sucked on mobile. I'm glad Adobe is finally admitting it.
Die flash die! (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?
Re:Good riddance. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Hmm... (Score:1, Insightful)
But doesn't this mean Android devices are going to be only able to view half the web now? I thought Flash was the amazing killer feature of Android...
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Insightful)
The killer feature for Android is that it releases better, faster, and more feature rich phones several times a year.
Re:Good riddance. (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.
Re:Strange direction (Score:5, 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...)
Re:Good riddance. (Score:2, Insightful)
I always wondered about that, why would they kill off something that is in a lot of web sites, and then I got all conspiracy theory and thought that they were in cahoots with Apple to kill Android, since Android was basically the only one that can support it, and is competition to Apple's clout
Re:Adobe Edge (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good riddance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good riddance. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good riddance. (Score:5, 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.