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Did Adobe ever put a serious effort into mobile Flash development? It seems they were more interested in blaming Apple for the lack of mobile Flash than actual

Did Adobe ever put a serious effort into mobile Flash development? It seems they were more interested in blaming Apple for the lack of mobile Flash than actually doing the work required to make Flash a remotely viable option for mobile devices. I wonder, what was the catalyst that caused Adobe to admit what everyone else already knew? Perhaps they saw the 5 year anniversary of the iPhone on horizon and figured enough BS is enough.

redthrowaway 15y ago
They probably gave it a good shot, but couldn't get it anywhere near lean enough. Flash turns laptops into battery-powered space heaters; on a mobile device it's just a non-starter. Flash is just a dying tech. Were someone to seamlessly roll its functionality into an easy to use package, I'm sure you'd see it die out for games as well, which is the only remaining use-case there isn't a ready replacement for.
- thought_alarm 15y ago
  I'm sure no one understands the technical challenges better than Adobe's engineers. The problem is that the company never admitted these challenges to their developers and customers (until now). Instead, they continually explained the problem as merely a political fight with Apple. Your website is no good on mobile? Don't blame us, blame Apple's lust for control. At worst, they flat out lied to their developers and customers. At best, they are merely incompetent. Either way, if I were heavily invested in any Adobe technology I would seriously question how I could continue to trust that company.
  - idspispopd 15y ago
    Amanita Design, creators of the indy award winning flash-based game "Machinarium", recently released this title to iPad. Machinarium is a basic point and click puzzle adventure. If written in native code this would have no issue running on even the first iPhone (of which there are plenty of similarly detailed games.) However due to using the Adobe iOS tools(air etc.) The performance is dismal on iPad 2. iPad 1 owners have mostly sought refunds, and left bad reviews - forcing the developer to make the game "iPad 2 only" despite being a battery killing lap heater. (This already puts it in the apple cross-hairs as it's available to download to iPad 1 users.) Discontinuing flash player is only half of Adobe's problem, the bad code is still being manufactured into processor-heavy apps which sap battery life and demand far-higher specs than what would normally be required if writing in native code, as noted in the example above. The crux of the problem is that it's not a small amount of additional processing overhead, these basic apps are churning through battery via excessive cpu time. These tools from Adobe are allow developers to port their flash games to the app store, and instead of increasing their revenue, it's creating problems and damaging their image/fan base.
    - ntoshev 15y ago
      I'm not sure Machinarium problems stem from the Adobe toolchain. The developer says it's because they hit RAM limit with iPad 1 and load resources statically: "The memory limitations of iPad 1 (which are somewhere around 115 MB RAM per app) are just quite challenging. You have to have it running around 80-90 to keep it stable and the app has tons of timeline animations, the sources are 1 GB, all compiled into one single SWF file + some assets. The app was originally made for PC and upgraded for tablet devices. When you start creating tablet apps from scratch it's a whole different story. The game is now made with 'no compromises' compared to the desktop version and that keeps it unique." http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/12/daily-ipad-app-machinarium/ http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/12/daily-ipad-app-machinarium/
- lloeki 15y ago
  > Flash on a laptop turns it into a battery-draining space heater The worst part being it is so even for trivial flash objects like those "copy to clipboard" clicky thingies (e.g github). It was not skyrocketing to 1.0 loads but enough to prevent the CPU to go in some deep C-state mode and/or back off frequency or whatever. Having such a NOOP Flash object was literally removing in order of hours from my battery life ("was", because ClickToFlash is brilliant). I guess that way they will be true to their promise: the next iteration of Flash for Mobile will, in a way, be both stable and a non-battery sucker.
- kalleboo 15y ago
  Flash isn't dead yet since HTML5 hasn't really arrived. On mobile platforms where Flash is supported, it still outperforms HTML5. And the HTML5 toolset is still completely non-existant.
- xiaoma 15y ago
  >They probably gave it a good shot, but couldn't get it anywhere near lean enough. Flash turns laptops into battery-powered space heaters; on a mobile device it's just a non-starter. I gotta call BS on that. I've personally played hundreds if not thousands of flash games on an under-powered $500 laptop purchased in 2009. The article itself mentioned the success of flash on Blackberry devices, due largely to the fact that they cooperated with Adobe's engineers instead of freezing them out.
  - dextorious 15y ago
    What Flash "success" on Blackberry? That's like the overstatement of the year...
  - flomo 15y ago
    More like "Flash turns Apple laptops into battery-powered space heaters". The OS X player is so cruddy that simple ads will cause my MBP to spin up the fans.
9999 15y ago
Yes, they put some effort into mobile Flash (specifically flash lite) development when they could justify the cost with the revenue they were receiving from handset manufacturers that licensed it. Then the iPhone came out without Flash. Then Steve Jobs slammed Flash (approximately half of which was true) and told Adobe to go back to making tools to help people make shit. And Adobe actually listened to jobs. I feel like Flash was an end in itself for Macromedia. It was, in part, Macromedia's great tilt at the "write once, run anywhere" windmill, and Adobe just carried that on (and I would say it's the public that loses out now that that's over). In the end, it doesn't matter to Adobe that the Flash runtime isn't in the iOS browser. Or in any browser from here on out. Adobe sells tools to make shit. Jobs gave them a way to sell a new tool (Edge) and reminded them what they're actually in the business of doing. That being said, I greatly appreciate everything the devs that worked on the Player have accomplished over the last few years (particularly Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason, and Matt Kaufman). Thanks for tilting at the windmill.
- YooLi 15y ago
  Out of curiosity, which half was true and which wasn't?
  - 9999 15y ago
    Bullshit: "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary." Well, except for the SWF format, the mxmlc SWF compiler, the Tamarind interpreter, most of the popular video codecs, the FLV container format, AMF, RTMP... And I could go on. Huh. Okay, I guess the only things that are "proprietary" are the authoring tool (although you're welcome to make your own) and some very important parts of the actual Flash Player (if Adobe had open sourced the player 5 years ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation). "The full web." Flash is still an important part of the full web. There's a lot of stuff that you will just never be able to do with the browser alone (capture video, do p2p networking, etc.) or that will be so difficult to implement amongst the many competing browsers that it's only economically feasible for giant companies to develop web applications. But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store. "Touch" Adobe's APIs for Touch work pretty well, but they require developers to update their applications. Not particularly hard (compared to porting a flash game to Obj-C anyway). True: "reliability, security, and performance" Enough said. "Battery life." Software based rendering of graphics and decoding of video is obviously going to be way harder on battery life. Middleman lock-in Apple was burned in the past by this, but it doesn't seem like that much of a threat now.
w0utert 15y ago
> I wonder, what was the catalyst that caused Adobe to admit what everyone else already knew? I think it's pretty obvious. Adobe simply did the math and figured out that they are losing money on supporting the myriad of mobile devices that get thrown on the market promising 'the full web' with Flash. High development effort, low income, big competitive threat from upcoming HTML5 authoring tools. Remember when Flash was still only available on Windows, Linux and OS X? Even then Adobe had a hard time properly supporting OS X and Linux, which have always been second-class citizens compared to the Flash Player for Windows. 6 months ago Flash Player for OS X didn't even have GPU accelerated video, and there wasn't even a 64-bit version for Linux. The only reason this has improved somewhat is because Adobe had to show the world that they were serious about supporting Flash, and to counter all the negative press Flash got as a result of iOS not supporting it, and OS X and Linux users complaining about it. Now imagine the investment Adobe probably has to make to support 20 different ARM SoC's, and make the player even more efficient than it is on Windows PC's, knowing that neither iOS, nor WP7, nor Windows 8 Metro will ever support it. All just to sell a few more licenses for their Flash authoring tools, which is probably a dwindling business already. Flash is dead because the world has moved on, and there is no money to be made from it anymore.
cpeterso 15y ago
> Did Adobe ever put a serious effort into mobile Flash development? Yes. The Adobe Flash Player team, believe it or not, is easily over 100 engineers working on a variety of core and related projects (but not including the Flash Authoring, Flex Builder, and Adobe AIR teams). Of those, about 10-30 engineers are dedicated to Android depending on management edict of the week. The entire Flash Runtime org (including QA, managers, and the AIR team) is over 400 people.

redthrowaway 15y ago

They probably gave it a good shot, but couldn't get it anywhere near lean enough. Flash turns laptops into battery-powered space heaters; on a mobile device it's just a non-starter. Flash is just a dying tech. Were someone to seamlessly roll its functionality into an easy to use package, I'm sure you'd see it die out for games as well, which is the only remaining use-case there isn't a ready replacement for.

thought_alarm 15y ago
I'm sure no one understands the technical challenges better than Adobe's engineers. The problem is that the company never admitted these challenges to their developers and customers (until now). Instead, they continually explained the problem as merely a political fight with Apple. Your website is no good on mobile? Don't blame us, blame Apple's lust for control. At worst, they flat out lied to their developers and customers. At best, they are merely incompetent. Either way, if I were heavily invested in any Adobe technology I would seriously question how I could continue to trust that company.
- idspispopd 15y ago
  Amanita Design, creators of the indy award winning flash-based game "Machinarium", recently released this title to iPad. Machinarium is a basic point and click puzzle adventure. If written in native code this would have no issue running on even the first iPhone (of which there are plenty of similarly detailed games.) However due to using the Adobe iOS tools(air etc.) The performance is dismal on iPad 2. iPad 1 owners have mostly sought refunds, and left bad reviews - forcing the developer to make the game "iPad 2 only" despite being a battery killing lap heater. (This already puts it in the apple cross-hairs as it's available to download to iPad 1 users.) Discontinuing flash player is only half of Adobe's problem, the bad code is still being manufactured into processor-heavy apps which sap battery life and demand far-higher specs than what would normally be required if writing in native code, as noted in the example above. The crux of the problem is that it's not a small amount of additional processing overhead, these basic apps are churning through battery via excessive cpu time. These tools from Adobe are allow developers to port their flash games to the app store, and instead of increasing their revenue, it's creating problems and damaging their image/fan base.
  - ntoshev 15y ago
    I'm not sure Machinarium problems stem from the Adobe toolchain. The developer says it's because they hit RAM limit with iPad 1 and load resources statically: "The memory limitations of iPad 1 (which are somewhere around 115 MB RAM per app) are just quite challenging. You have to have it running around 80-90 to keep it stable and the app has tons of timeline animations, the sources are 1 GB, all compiled into one single SWF file + some assets. The app was originally made for PC and upgraded for tablet devices. When you start creating tablet apps from scratch it's a whole different story. The game is now made with 'no compromises' compared to the desktop version and that keeps it unique." http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/12/daily-ipad-app-machinarium/ http://www.tuaw.com/2011/09/12/daily-ipad-app-machinarium/
lloeki 15y ago
> Flash on a laptop turns it into a battery-draining space heater The worst part being it is so even for trivial flash objects like those "copy to clipboard" clicky thingies (e.g github). It was not skyrocketing to 1.0 loads but enough to prevent the CPU to go in some deep C-state mode and/or back off frequency or whatever. Having such a NOOP Flash object was literally removing in order of hours from my battery life ("was", because ClickToFlash is brilliant). I guess that way they will be true to their promise: the next iteration of Flash for Mobile will, in a way, be both stable and a non-battery sucker.
kalleboo 15y ago
Flash isn't dead yet since HTML5 hasn't really arrived. On mobile platforms where Flash is supported, it still outperforms HTML5. And the HTML5 toolset is still completely non-existant.
xiaoma 15y ago
>They probably gave it a good shot, but couldn't get it anywhere near lean enough. Flash turns laptops into battery-powered space heaters; on a mobile device it's just a non-starter. I gotta call BS on that. I've personally played hundreds if not thousands of flash games on an under-powered $500 laptop purchased in 2009. The article itself mentioned the success of flash on Blackberry devices, due largely to the fact that they cooperated with Adobe's engineers instead of freezing them out.
- dextorious 15y ago
  What Flash "success" on Blackberry? That's like the overstatement of the year...
- flomo 15y ago
  More like "Flash turns Apple laptops into battery-powered space heaters". The OS X player is so cruddy that simple ads will cause my MBP to spin up the fans.

9999 15y ago

Yes, they put some effort into mobile Flash (specifically flash lite) development when they could justify the cost with the revenue they were receiving from handset manufacturers that licensed it. Then the iPhone came out without Flash. Then Steve Jobs slammed Flash (approximately half of which was true) and told Adobe to go back to making tools to help people make shit. And Adobe actually listened to jobs. I feel like Flash was an end in itself for Macromedia. It was, in part, Macromedia's great tilt at the "write once, run anywhere" windmill, and Adobe just carried that on (and I would say it's the public that loses out now that that's over). In the end, it doesn't matter to Adobe that the Flash runtime isn't in the iOS browser. Or in any browser from here on out. Adobe sells tools to make shit. Jobs gave them a way to sell a new tool (Edge) and reminded them what they're actually in the business of doing. That being said, I greatly appreciate everything the devs that worked on the Player have accomplished over the last few years (particularly Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason, and Matt Kaufman). Thanks for tilting at the windmill.

YooLi 15y ago
Out of curiosity, which half was true and which wasn't?
- 9999 15y ago
  Bullshit: "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary." Well, except for the SWF format, the mxmlc SWF compiler, the Tamarind interpreter, most of the popular video codecs, the FLV container format, AMF, RTMP... And I could go on. Huh. Okay, I guess the only things that are "proprietary" are the authoring tool (although you're welcome to make your own) and some very important parts of the actual Flash Player (if Adobe had open sourced the player 5 years ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation). "The full web." Flash is still an important part of the full web. There's a lot of stuff that you will just never be able to do with the browser alone (capture video, do p2p networking, etc.) or that will be so difficult to implement amongst the many competing browsers that it's only economically feasible for giant companies to develop web applications. But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store. "Touch" Adobe's APIs for Touch work pretty well, but they require developers to update their applications. Not particularly hard (compared to porting a flash game to Obj-C anyway). True: "reliability, security, and performance" Enough said. "Battery life." Software based rendering of graphics and decoding of video is obviously going to be way harder on battery life. Middleman lock-in Apple was burned in the past by this, but it doesn't seem like that much of a threat now.

w0utert 15y ago

> I wonder, what was the catalyst that caused Adobe to admit what everyone else already knew? I think it's pretty obvious. Adobe simply did the math and figured out that they are losing money on supporting the myriad of mobile devices that get thrown on the market promising 'the full web' with Flash. High development effort, low income, big competitive threat from upcoming HTML5 authoring tools. Remember when Flash was still only available on Windows, Linux and OS X? Even then Adobe had a hard time properly supporting OS X and Linux, which have always been second-class citizens compared to the Flash Player for Windows. 6 months ago Flash Player for OS X didn't even have GPU accelerated video, and there wasn't even a 64-bit version for Linux. The only reason this has improved somewhat is because Adobe had to show the world that they were serious about supporting Flash, and to counter all the negative press Flash got as a result of iOS not supporting it, and OS X and Linux users complaining about it. Now imagine the investment Adobe probably has to make to support 20 different ARM SoC's, and make the player even more efficient than it is on Windows PC's, knowing that neither iOS, nor WP7, nor Windows 8 Metro will ever support it. All just to sell a few more licenses for their Flash authoring tools, which is probably a dwindling business already. Flash is dead because the world has moved on, and there is no money to be made from it anymore.

cpeterso 15y ago

> Did Adobe ever put a serious effort into mobile Flash development? Yes. The Adobe Flash Player team, believe it or not, is easily over 100 engineers working on a variety of core and related projects (but not including the Flash Authoring, Flex Builder, and Adobe AIR teams). Of those, about 10-30 engineers are dedicated to Android depending on management edict of the week. The entire Flash Runtime org (including QA, managers, and the AIR team) is over 400 people.