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."
wasn't it already dead? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm certain it was Steve Jobs that killed Adobe Flash player on mobile devices a couple years ago.
Strange direction (Score:5, 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).
Re:Good riddance. (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.
grab a copy now? (is it possible) (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good riddance. (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that that would be a no-go. They clearly don't much care about whatever pile of hacks and shims and eldrich blasphemy got Flash running on something that wasn't Win32; but I would strongly suspect that cross-platform stuff like, say, their precious little DRM system, that they hope will save them from HTML5 video by ensuring that 'premium content' providers remain loyal, is worth far more to them closed than open.
What surprises me, really, is that Adobe never got Flash to work properly even as the capabilities of handhelds have shot through the roof. Ok, Flash sucks on a 528MHz ARM11 with 192 MB of RAM and a painfully-underpolished Android 1.6 OS. Why does it still suck on systems with 2-4x as many cores(each clocked 2-3x faster and generally based on a more sophisticated ARM flavor), and a GB of RAM?
Re:I wonder how many fools.. (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be arguing against a point I never tried to make. But for content providers the video streaming framework is still more mature than for HTML5 video. That is why people still use it. My point was only about addressing the complaint of getting rid of Flash meant it was being replaced by H.264, but this is silly since Flash video IS H.264 in almost every case nowadays.
Didn't mean to sound argumentative... was more exuberant. Flash, however, was never needed for what it was used for 99% of the time. Another thread mentioned Black and Tans... so I thought of a terrible metaphor. Flash is like Harp... a decent pale lager, but it becomes exceptional when mixed properly, wrapped, as it were, around Guinness ... which unfortunately for this metaphor can only be vector animation or a web game. So... Adobe says "Hey! What's good for Guiness is good for EVERYTHING! Mix it with your gin! It's a better vermouth! Mix it with your whiskey, it's a better sour!" Trouble is, Harp doesn't mix that well with anything but Guinness, no matter what the bartender says. And eventually, people will start hating Harp... because its just awful when it's used improperly, and unless it's by itself or with Guinness, it's being used improperly. Flash was never intended to be a video wrapper... that was just something that it could do but only did well during the very earliest part of the last decade under special circumstances, before bandwidth was taken for granted. Adobe kept leveraging it for video, however, long after it was reasonable to do so. Eventually, everyone hates Flash and forgets that its actually a decent app platform and wonderful for vector animation. Had Adobe stepped back off pushing it as a video wrapper, for which it is terrible for the extra processing overhead, and left it to find it's true usefulness, perhaps most web users wouldn't despise it.
Re:Good riddance. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no reason to doubt the power of Adobe's marketing department; but server-side transcoding seems unlikely to be a very lucrative niche. Flash has supported h.264 video for a while now(since somewhere in the 8.x or 9.x window, I think) and much of the 'flash video' on the web, even if it still has a .swf or .flv extension, often turns out to be h.264. In that case, the only change they'll need to make is to the site code: instead of the "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, tell them to go download flash", they'll need "detect flash, if flash detected, play, else, HTML5 play".
What will be interesting is if, for those customers who actually use the fancy 'flash video' features(RTMPe, anything DRM related, whatever 'adaptive streaming' sauce Adobe may have offered) will now have the exciting opportunity to purchase the Adobe Video Client SDK for Android in order to build apps to replace their now nonfunctional websites...
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
It is amazing isn't it?
Slashdot before Android:Flash sucks, it's closed and proprietary:
Slashdot after Flash was available for Android and not iOS: Flash is great! It lets us view the whole web!
Slashdot after Adobe kills Flash on Android: Flash sucked anyway.