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Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1

84 points by jdhouse4 14y ago

kamechan 14y ago
here's to hoping that google will step in here as they did with linux and make it run anyway...
- leke 14y ago
  I think that's exactly why Adobe did it. Save money by making google do the work for us.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 14y ago
    The company had already said that HTML5 was the way forward on phones and tablets -- now we know just how quickly it's backing up that claim. Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now? I use iOS devices and completely removed Flash from my Mac months ago. There is a Safari plugin to force the use of the H264 stream from youtube. Haven't missed Flash at all.
    - k-mcgrady 14y ago
      I would like to do this but I've found that YouTube's HTML5 player is terrible. Buffering is always erratic and just loading the page causes my browser to freeze for 5-10 seconds (it usually starts working again once the video is loaded into the player). As much as I want to see Flash go away it's still the best choice for web video on a desktop machine (at least on YouTube).
      - Synaesthesia 14y ago
        Yes, the Youtube HTML5 player is bad, but the Safari plug in mentioned (I think it only works on Mac) is great. It's called youtube5 btw
        2muchcoffeeman 14y ago
        Yes, unfortunately it is for OS X Safari only http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/ http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/. But it does show you can get on just fine without Flash. There is no equivalent Chrome extension. I don't know why. A completely Flash free experience is the reason I use Safari.
    - ars 14y ago
      > Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now? Flash is not used just for video, there are a huge number of games that use it and HTML5 is not ready for prime time there. (Not enough browser support, and coding a game in HTML5 is much harder.)
    - Skrekkpus 14y ago
      developing anything equivalent to a half ambitious flash app in html5 is just really hard. html5 has a long way to go.
    - molmalo 14y ago
      We still need a nice editor to let designers handle HTML5 nicely. Adobe is making progress, but until them or somebody else releases a fully functional product ready for designers, well... it won't be that easy.... Edit: why would someone downvote this? Do you really believe that designers (not developers) should handle canvas and Javascript directly instead of using an editor?
    - noduerme 14y ago
      Because gaming. Pretty much any graphics operation you can do in Flash can be done with Javascript and Canvas. But it requires writing several times as much code, runs about 20% of the speed and consumes most of the CPU to do simple tasks. For example, lets say you want to create a little green radar HUD map for where enemies are on a battlefield in front of you. In AS3 you can make each enemy dot be a sprite, and move them individually when necessary. You can mask them when they reach the edge of the HUD, fade them out when they disappear. When you turn left or right, they all turn together. Because of how Flash's graphics engine works, only the graphical areas that are changed in each frame are actually redrawn; this is all handled at a very low level and the speed is close to native; it can also be coded to take advantage of a GPU. To accomplish the same thing in Javascript and Canvas, you have to write an engine that tracks where each of those things is in global space. To draw little rectangles at different rotations within the same canvas, you actually have to rotate the canvas, draw the rectangle, then unrotate the canvas. Once you've got this engine written, you still have to redraw the entire canvas with your engine deciding how to draw each pixel, square or circle, one by one, with every single frame. To get around that, you write another engine that determines which areas are changing and only redraws those. But then you have to decide what to do when overlapping objects are in front of or behind that area, so now you've written a scene graph, z-order and a traverser, and possibly parent-child relationships, from scratch. Fine, but you realize that the traverser, running as it is in untyped javascript without the benefit of typed iterators like vectors, can't handle more than a dozen objects before it's hogging up even more of the CPU than if you just redrew the whole stupid canvas every single frame. So, all this behavior is necessary for any game. Good coders are struggling to make these things playable in HTML5 to keep the mobile market happy, but to do that you have to cut a lot of corners. The game quality's obviously lower, and the games are slower than they would be in AS3. It's just unavoidable. People who don't know how computers work then complain that Flash is so slow, etc. because of the perception of sloppily coded banners and stuff. But when the same exact things are written in Javascript and Canvas they are much, much slower.
    - novalis 14y ago
      There are several reasons, audio in html5 is not ready at this point. Also, 3d in javascript is miles away from being a reality (actual 3d, like in x,y,z referenced points, not the anaglyphic 3d kind) and Mr. Doob with his fantastic three.js is still a distance away from what can be done in flash/actionscript now. Those are some of the reason actionscript, air and flex are going to be around for a long time, even on mobile. If you "miss it" or you don't miss it, that is your own constructed opinion and it won't make flash go away sooner/later or ever for that matter Flash simply outputs to ios executables now and you don't have a clue you are running it anymore, so, maybe that is part of why you don't miss it. You don't seem to miss the know how of why it is necessary still, so that kind of loops to the point you don't know why we can't "just move onto HTML5 now?" Weird huh. How did that come about. Picking camps is not the same as having a valid opinion based on objective reason, in your case it makes you stand out like a meme based "are we there yet" user. Cheerleading is awesome. But it really doesn't make the players score on its own. Last reason why it won't "go away", flash developers get paid to make chart topping games that run on ios, while apple takes a store app cut from it.
- mtgx 14y ago
  Google will not do that. Chrome doesn't support Flash at all on Android, and since Adobe plans on stopping support for mobile forever, I don't see why they would go back to supporting it in the future, unless Android becomes some sort of mega-successful desktop OS by then, and somehow Flash is still popular on the desktop by then.
kleiba 14y ago
Gnash to the rescue!
- zanny 14y ago
  Why not just bake libflv support into Firefox / Chrome <video> tags?
  - gcp 14y ago
    I'm guessing, but because that only covers video?
zobzu 14y ago
its not really that adobe won't support it. its that chrome is default and never supported it. I bet we can install ICS's flash and whatever req. libs and it works with other browsers.
- gcp 14y ago
  If you can install it from the market it will likely just work with Firefox.
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    They're blocking installs after August 15th, so if you want it, you'd better hurry. Though it isn't clear what happens if you've installed Flash previously, but not on the particular device you want it on.
    - stephengillie 14y ago
      In an update on its official blog, Adobe said that there will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1 and beginning August 15, it will start limiting access to updates to only users that have Flash Player installed. From http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/06/29/abobe-pulls-support-for-flash-player-on-android-4-1-limits-new-google-play-installations-from-august-15/ http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/06/29/abobe-pulls-support-... (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175853 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175853)
    - molmalo 14y ago
      The apk will continue to exist though.
JoshTriplett 14y ago
Hopefully the absence of Flash on both major mobile platforms will help speed its demise on non-mobile platforms as well. On the other hand, this news might just precede another announcement from Google saying "don't worry, Adobe doesn't support it anymore, but we do", just as they did for Flash on Linux.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  It wasn't in Windows 8, too, but Adobe made it sandboxable. Unfortunately.
- ido 14y ago
  What is your problem with flash, really? I honestly can't think of a better platform for web games (and it's one of the easiest way to develop 2d games, regardless of web or not). The only thing I can think of is people who don't care about games, in that case flash does seem like an annoyance more than anything (we can do without flash restaurant sites or punch the monkey banners, but i suspect html5/js will just take its place there). But really, it's a great game development platform and mostly runs really well on windows and these days well enough on linux & mac (assuming the programmer isn't doing something dumb like a busy waiting loop, which would suck resources regardless of platform). haxe+flash runtime is my favorite environment for developing (and playing) 2d games by a long shot, so I am always a bit puzzled by all the flack it's getting.
  - Achshar 14y ago
    I think the problem isnt flash itself but the fact that it's proprietary. This is the reason we have such news in the first place. If adobe drops support, it's dead. No such thing with open stuff. No one entity has all the control. This is where html5 upper leg, no one can suddenly start charging you for using it or dictate it's development.
  - alister 14y ago
    What's the problem with Flash? 1. Ceaselessly the biggest security hole on desktop computers. 2. Proprietary. 3. The need to install it in the first place and keep updating it. (And, no, I don't want it to auto-update.) 4. Can't cut and paste text from it. It's ridiculous to have to manually write down an address or phone number from a Flash-based site. 5. Search engines don't properly index it. 6. A Flash developer can hold you hostage by not giving you the "source" (the FLA master file). 7. It's allegedly a major source of browser crashes (or so I've read though I can't prove this). 8. It's slow. A website is insanely bloated to use Flash when text and pictures could have communicated the same information. 9. It imposes DRM even when the content owner didn't intend it. Think of all the subterfuge and trickery necessary to download a Flash video even when the website owner wouldn't have minded.
zmmmmm 14y ago
It's interesting how hard they are pushing this; there is still quite a lot of Flash on the web ... at least most smaller sites hosting / streaming video seem to still rely on it. I actually would have thought they could make a decent bit of revenue just by offering it to OEMs as a selling point. Perhaps they see even more revenue by forcing all the recalcitrant sites still using Flash to buy Adobe's tools as the easiest upgrade path to get onto HTML5.
- mkaltenecker 14y ago
  If things go like they did in the past, 4.1 being widely adopted is years away. I don’t see this having much if any impact on anything right now.
  - zmmmmm 14y ago
    Well, if they are pulling it from the market then it will have an impact much sooner than that. I suppose device manufacturers might ship it bundled.
zanny 14y ago
There is the downside to this, in that by forcing rapid adoption of web video via <video> they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked by mpeg open source video software is doomed. Why can't we just use ogv :(
- asdfaoeu 14y ago
  You're practically limited to h.264 anyway on mobile devices none of the hardware has support for anything else.
  - fpgeek 14y ago
    Every Gingerbread and up phone has support for WebM.
    - icebraining 14y ago
      Hardware support?
      - DannyBee 14y ago
        Newer SOC's have hardware support for it. OMAP4470 supports it in hardware (so galaxy nexus like phones). OMAP54XX supports it in hardware. Tegra 3 supports it in hardware. So just in time for this development ;)
- JoshTriplett 14y ago
  On the contrary, Flash helped h.264 win in the first place. If Flash didn't always exist as a fallback, then sites might have actually needed to offer WebM as an alternative. But with Flash available, sites could just use H.264 and fall back to Flash for anyone without support for H.264 in <video>.
- gcp 14y ago
  they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked open source video software is doomed Aside from libavc, Firefox (and well, Chromium) just doesn't play H264 video at all, for much the same considerations.
nkurz 14y ago
What's Adobe's long term strategy here? I'm happy to see it go, but this seems like it would just be hasten the demise of Flash on the internet. I haven't been following this, but assumed that Adobe benefited from the ubiquity Flash on the desktop. Have they just chosen to get out of this market altogether and concentrate their efforts elsewhere? Or is there a master plan I'm not seeing?
- molmalo 14y ago
  Adobe's core business is not developing platforms, but developing the editors and tools for designers. Graphic design, web design, vector, raster, doesn't matter. They make money selling their software, not deploying flash all over the web. Here you have a link to a comment I made a few months ago, about Adobe's shifting strategy regarding Flash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503774 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503774 I'll copy here some parts, so I can edit a little, mostly to adjust for current trends: ------------ Their business is to make and sell amazing Editors. CS is their main product. They bought Macromedia, just to own much of the market of Designer-oriented applications. And Macromedia filled a Gap. But from now on, they are investing heavily in building tools for HTML5. -You can see them building Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools. [1] (this link is almost a year old, so I'd expect them to have something much more advanced by now). - They are building HTML5 Editors [2] - They stopped developing Flash Player mobile. [3] In the same post where they state that they will stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, they state: Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5. Ok, ok, they also state that they will keep working in Flash for desktop. But it's like when any software company says: "We'll drop X, Y, Z so we can focus on A". That's something said to please their shareholders, so it doesn't sounds like "As our products are no longer needed, we'll just kill them". If you are a guest inside the browser, and the browser developer just throws you away (iOS, Windows 8 in Metro, only running in whitelist-pages), you have to move somewhere else. Adobe just wants to keep selling their Creative Suite. So, the best thing for them to do, is to focus on HTML5, because they now know that Flash is doomed sooner or later. And they are doing it. I expect to see in the near future something like Adobe Flash Professional but designed for HTML5. [1] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/ [2] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ [3] http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.htm... One more thing: Imagine for a moment that you are Adobe. You have an amazing suite of products, and a few of them are based on Flash. You realize that the browser developers have chosen to work and invest in something else. You go through all 5 stages of grief [4]. You deny it, you get angry, you bargain, you get depressed, but finally at least, you accept it. You HAVE to adapt and you have to work with them. But you won't have anything to sell for at least 1 or 2 years. And you still have this wonderful suite on the market. What do you do? Do you go out and yell: DON'T BUY IT! WAIT UNTIL WE RELEASE OUR FUTURE-PROOF PRODUCT!!! Of course not!!! You say We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences But at the same time, in the same paragraph you say: We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged. Read it again: a smooth transition to HTML5. TRANSITION. That's their way to say: "Keep buying and using our products, while we develop our HTML5 editors. Then, you can buy our new products and move to HTML5 too." They have went through the last phase. They have accepted it. And they are adapting, good for them :) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model
listic 14y ago
I'm afraid the reason Flash works poorly on platforms other than Win32 and Adobe is dropping the platform support is that they don't have the people that understand their code anymore, and there's noone to make it run (properly) on new platforms.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  If you had a choice, would you work on a project like that? Some of these projects spell doom when they show up on a resume because they're already associated with badness. Once that happens, good luck getting any good people to work on it. As you can see, such a situation can sustain itself. I call it "The Bozo Loop", incidentally.
  - illumin8 14y ago
    That's not really correct. Senior Mobile Software Developer, Adobe Corporation would look good on almost any resume.
EnderMB 14y ago
It appears that no one who has commented so far has used Flash on ICS. I use Flash on my Galaxy Nexus, and it runs perfectly fine for everything I want to look at. Sure, it's rubbish for things like games and full-flash websites (the latter should be long gone by now anyway) but for watching Flash videos on news websites it's fantastic, and it works just as well as it does on the desktop. I want Flash gone as much as the next guy, but video on HTML5 is no more usable.
- molmalo 14y ago
  Video on mobile browsers should launch a video player like YouTube does when you follow a link their site. But also there should exist an attribute to avoid this for some cases.
  - EnderMB 14y ago
    YouTube isn't the only Flash video player though. What if you click a Vimeo link? What about a link on the BBC? It would be ideal if there were a good native solution for all videos, but I can imagine this to be quite a hard problem.
    - molmalo 14y ago
      I said "a video player" meaning a generic one. like when you click an flv link or rtsp, that launches the stock video app in my phone (ics)
mbq 14y ago
I can't understand why they haven't just made FP open source... Flash on the web is maybe dead, but it is still usable for kiosks, games and AIR-related stuff (AIR used to be a best idea for platform-independent wrapper of active PDFs, thus killing it is a strike into this technology). So it is possible to sustain the Flash market for years with minimal costs...
LukaD 14y ago
And I confirm that I will turn off flash in all my browsers now.
illumin8 14y ago
It's funny listening to the doublespeak from Android apologists who lambasted iOS for not having Flash. Now, in Android fanboy world, it's somehow a good thing that Adobe is removing it? Steve Jobs was right all along.
cletus 14y ago
Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible user experience. One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature. Flash isn't horrible per se. It's horrible because Adobe is completely incompetent in making it run stably and on platforms other than Windows (and even there it's a stretch). Were they competent and the Flash experience just worked, I'd be fine with it. The suckiness of Flash is what's driving the adoption of HTML5/JS because, let's face it, HTML5/JS isn't exactly a mature platform yet. I just wish there was a way I could run a browser with Flash even installed without being bugged by "You're missing plugins. Would you like to install them?" Flashblock, Click-to-Flash and the like help but I'd rather not have the software installed at all. It makes me sad that Chrome bundles Flash and can't have it conveniently extracted either. To be fair, Apple didn't kill Flash (much as I'd like to give them credit for it). Adobe did.
- radley 14y ago
  So much hate. The worst side of HN always comes out when Flash comes up.
- talmand 14y ago
  But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on? Is it a matter of a Flash app that's badly designed? Because that's not Adobe's fault. If one were to duplicate the app's horrible user experience over to iOS does that mean the user experience for iOS apps can be considered as horrible? If I write some bad javascript that causes the browser to consistently crash does that mean that javascript or even the browser sucks? Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature for you. Let's not assume what's good for you must be good for everyone else. I for one have never had much of a problem with Flash on the hardware that I use, but in some circles a negative opinion always outweighs a positive one. The complaints about the problems you describe just running the Flash player on several different platforms are rather well deserved. It does seem that Adobe has decided at some point to drop the ball on the whole thing. But the player does support backwards compatibility all the way back to the beginning. I've always thought that possibly the majority of their problems relate to that. They should try just ripping out support for anything that uses versions less than actionscript 3 for a leaner plugin. But, this statement does seem more about the Flash player itself in the browser. It doesn't necessarily mean that Flash, as in the platform, will die. It'll probably live on as its own platform that requires something like Adobe Air to run on some hardware. Also, almost everything you hate about Flash's "user experience" will live on in the canvas tag. Unless I misunderstand what you mean by user experience.
bbayer 14y ago
Flash is a platform and it is very unique virtual machine. It has its own features. Since it is a virtual machine it has great potential. I think most problematic part that Adobe has to face is fragmentation. It is very complex task to maintain a complex VM ( which consists of very high level graphics capabilities) to run smoothly on every single hardware. Flash has provided lots of great stuff which is not provided by any platform before. Even now there is no any other choice for specific tasks like P2P video.
thethimble 14y ago
This is a good move. I'm glad Adobe is coming to terms with the end of Flash. Moving resources away from Flash to other areas where Adobe is successful is a win for everyone.
prioris 14y ago
If Adobe allows Google to adopt flash and continue support to develop and support it then I don't see any problem. Android is Google's baby so they need to adopt the flash development. Adobe is fecked up if they don't allow it. As far Flash being terrible. I have never had any negative experiences. This blanket negative view of flash is just hype. It is used all over the place. In the hands of a bad programmer, any application can be terrible. Performance tests between flash and html5 don't show much advantage to using html5. The PRIMARY and ONLY reason for moving to html5 is that it is not proprietary. As far as security hole, it was put there intentionally. Windows OS is one big security hole so it is like pointing to a tree in a forest. Other reasons are frivolous. So we should move towards html5 but keep flash player working on all platforms until full migration of internet occurs to html5. There is simply too much flash content so it will take a long time to migrate.

84 points by jdhouse4 14y ago

kamechan 14y ago

here's to hoping that google will step in here as they did with linux and make it run anyway...

leke 14y ago
I think that's exactly why Adobe did it. Save money by making google do the work for us.
- 2muchcoffeeman 14y ago
  The company had already said that HTML5 was the way forward on phones and tablets -- now we know just how quickly it's backing up that claim. Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now? I use iOS devices and completely removed Flash from my Mac months ago. There is a Safari plugin to force the use of the H264 stream from youtube. Haven't missed Flash at all.
  - k-mcgrady 14y ago
    I would like to do this but I've found that YouTube's HTML5 player is terrible. Buffering is always erratic and just loading the page causes my browser to freeze for 5-10 seconds (it usually starts working again once the video is loaded into the player). As much as I want to see Flash go away it's still the best choice for web video on a desktop machine (at least on YouTube).
    - Synaesthesia 14y ago
      Yes, the Youtube HTML5 player is bad, but the Safari plug in mentioned (I think it only works on Mac) is great. It's called youtube5 btw
      - 2muchcoffeeman 14y ago
        Yes, unfortunately it is for OS X Safari only http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/ http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/. But it does show you can get on just fine without Flash. There is no equivalent Chrome extension. I don't know why. A completely Flash free experience is the reason I use Safari.
  - ars 14y ago
    > Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now? Flash is not used just for video, there are a huge number of games that use it and HTML5 is not ready for prime time there. (Not enough browser support, and coding a game in HTML5 is much harder.)
  - Skrekkpus 14y ago
    developing anything equivalent to a half ambitious flash app in html5 is just really hard. html5 has a long way to go.
  - molmalo 14y ago
    We still need a nice editor to let designers handle HTML5 nicely. Adobe is making progress, but until them or somebody else releases a fully functional product ready for designers, well... it won't be that easy.... Edit: why would someone downvote this? Do you really believe that designers (not developers) should handle canvas and Javascript directly instead of using an editor?
  - noduerme 14y ago
    Because gaming. Pretty much any graphics operation you can do in Flash can be done with Javascript and Canvas. But it requires writing several times as much code, runs about 20% of the speed and consumes most of the CPU to do simple tasks. For example, lets say you want to create a little green radar HUD map for where enemies are on a battlefield in front of you. In AS3 you can make each enemy dot be a sprite, and move them individually when necessary. You can mask them when they reach the edge of the HUD, fade them out when they disappear. When you turn left or right, they all turn together. Because of how Flash's graphics engine works, only the graphical areas that are changed in each frame are actually redrawn; this is all handled at a very low level and the speed is close to native; it can also be coded to take advantage of a GPU. To accomplish the same thing in Javascript and Canvas, you have to write an engine that tracks where each of those things is in global space. To draw little rectangles at different rotations within the same canvas, you actually have to rotate the canvas, draw the rectangle, then unrotate the canvas. Once you've got this engine written, you still have to redraw the entire canvas with your engine deciding how to draw each pixel, square or circle, one by one, with every single frame. To get around that, you write another engine that determines which areas are changing and only redraws those. But then you have to decide what to do when overlapping objects are in front of or behind that area, so now you've written a scene graph, z-order and a traverser, and possibly parent-child relationships, from scratch. Fine, but you realize that the traverser, running as it is in untyped javascript without the benefit of typed iterators like vectors, can't handle more than a dozen objects before it's hogging up even more of the CPU than if you just redrew the whole stupid canvas every single frame. So, all this behavior is necessary for any game. Good coders are struggling to make these things playable in HTML5 to keep the mobile market happy, but to do that you have to cut a lot of corners. The game quality's obviously lower, and the games are slower than they would be in AS3. It's just unavoidable. People who don't know how computers work then complain that Flash is so slow, etc. because of the perception of sloppily coded banners and stuff. But when the same exact things are written in Javascript and Canvas they are much, much slower.
  - novalis 14y ago
    There are several reasons, audio in html5 is not ready at this point. Also, 3d in javascript is miles away from being a reality (actual 3d, like in x,y,z referenced points, not the anaglyphic 3d kind) and Mr. Doob with his fantastic three.js is still a distance away from what can be done in flash/actionscript now. Those are some of the reason actionscript, air and flex are going to be around for a long time, even on mobile. If you "miss it" or you don't miss it, that is your own constructed opinion and it won't make flash go away sooner/later or ever for that matter Flash simply outputs to ios executables now and you don't have a clue you are running it anymore, so, maybe that is part of why you don't miss it. You don't seem to miss the know how of why it is necessary still, so that kind of loops to the point you don't know why we can't "just move onto HTML5 now?" Weird huh. How did that come about. Picking camps is not the same as having a valid opinion based on objective reason, in your case it makes you stand out like a meme based "are we there yet" user. Cheerleading is awesome. But it really doesn't make the players score on its own. Last reason why it won't "go away", flash developers get paid to make chart topping games that run on ios, while apple takes a store app cut from it.
mtgx 14y ago
Google will not do that. Chrome doesn't support Flash at all on Android, and since Adobe plans on stopping support for mobile forever, I don't see why they would go back to supporting it in the future, unless Android becomes some sort of mega-successful desktop OS by then, and somehow Flash is still popular on the desktop by then.

kleiba 14y ago

Gnash to the rescue!

zanny 14y ago
Why not just bake libflv support into Firefox / Chrome <video> tags?
- gcp 14y ago
  I'm guessing, but because that only covers video?

zobzu 14y ago

its not really that adobe won't support it. its that chrome is default and never supported it. I bet we can install ICS's flash and whatever req. libs and it works with other browsers.

gcp 14y ago
If you can install it from the market it will likely just work with Firefox.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  They're blocking installs after August 15th, so if you want it, you'd better hurry. Though it isn't clear what happens if you've installed Flash previously, but not on the particular device you want it on.
  - stephengillie 14y ago
    In an update on its official blog, Adobe said that there will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1 and beginning August 15, it will start limiting access to updates to only users that have Flash Player installed. From http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/06/29/abobe-pulls-support-for-flash-player-on-android-4-1-limits-new-google-play-installations-from-august-15/ http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/06/29/abobe-pulls-support-... (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175853 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175853)
  - molmalo 14y ago
    The apk will continue to exist though.

JoshTriplett 14y ago

Hopefully the absence of Flash on both major mobile platforms will help speed its demise on non-mobile platforms as well. On the other hand, this news might just precede another announcement from Google saying "don't worry, Adobe doesn't support it anymore, but we do", just as they did for Flash on Linux.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
It wasn't in Windows 8, too, but Adobe made it sandboxable. Unfortunately.
ido 14y ago
What is your problem with flash, really? I honestly can't think of a better platform for web games (and it's one of the easiest way to develop 2d games, regardless of web or not). The only thing I can think of is people who don't care about games, in that case flash does seem like an annoyance more than anything (we can do without flash restaurant sites or punch the monkey banners, but i suspect html5/js will just take its place there). But really, it's a great game development platform and mostly runs really well on windows and these days well enough on linux & mac (assuming the programmer isn't doing something dumb like a busy waiting loop, which would suck resources regardless of platform). haxe+flash runtime is my favorite environment for developing (and playing) 2d games by a long shot, so I am always a bit puzzled by all the flack it's getting.
- Achshar 14y ago
  I think the problem isnt flash itself but the fact that it's proprietary. This is the reason we have such news in the first place. If adobe drops support, it's dead. No such thing with open stuff. No one entity has all the control. This is where html5 upper leg, no one can suddenly start charging you for using it or dictate it's development.
- alister 14y ago
  What's the problem with Flash? 1. Ceaselessly the biggest security hole on desktop computers. 2. Proprietary. 3. The need to install it in the first place and keep updating it. (And, no, I don't want it to auto-update.) 4. Can't cut and paste text from it. It's ridiculous to have to manually write down an address or phone number from a Flash-based site. 5. Search engines don't properly index it. 6. A Flash developer can hold you hostage by not giving you the "source" (the FLA master file). 7. It's allegedly a major source of browser crashes (or so I've read though I can't prove this). 8. It's slow. A website is insanely bloated to use Flash when text and pictures could have communicated the same information. 9. It imposes DRM even when the content owner didn't intend it. Think of all the subterfuge and trickery necessary to download a Flash video even when the website owner wouldn't have minded.

zmmmmm 14y ago

It's interesting how hard they are pushing this; there is still quite a lot of Flash on the web ... at least most smaller sites hosting / streaming video seem to still rely on it. I actually would have thought they could make a decent bit of revenue just by offering it to OEMs as a selling point. Perhaps they see even more revenue by forcing all the recalcitrant sites still using Flash to buy Adobe's tools as the easiest upgrade path to get onto HTML5.

mkaltenecker 14y ago
If things go like they did in the past, 4.1 being widely adopted is years away. I don’t see this having much if any impact on anything right now.
- zmmmmm 14y ago
  Well, if they are pulling it from the market then it will have an impact much sooner than that. I suppose device manufacturers might ship it bundled.

zanny 14y ago

There is the downside to this, in that by forcing rapid adoption of web video via <video> they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked by mpeg open source video software is doomed. Why can't we just use ogv :(

asdfaoeu 14y ago
You're practically limited to h.264 anyway on mobile devices none of the hardware has support for anything else.
- fpgeek 14y ago
  Every Gingerbread and up phone has support for WebM.
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Hardware support?
    - DannyBee 14y ago
      Newer SOC's have hardware support for it. OMAP4470 supports it in hardware (so galaxy nexus like phones). OMAP54XX supports it in hardware. Tegra 3 supports it in hardware. So just in time for this development ;)
JoshTriplett 14y ago
On the contrary, Flash helped h.264 win in the first place. If Flash didn't always exist as a fallback, then sites might have actually needed to offer WebM as an alternative. But with Flash available, sites could just use H.264 and fall back to Flash for anyone without support for H.264 in <video>.
gcp 14y ago
they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked open source video software is doomed Aside from libavc, Firefox (and well, Chromium) just doesn't play H264 video at all, for much the same considerations.

nkurz 14y ago

What's Adobe's long term strategy here? I'm happy to see it go, but this seems like it would just be hasten the demise of Flash on the internet. I haven't been following this, but assumed that Adobe benefited from the ubiquity Flash on the desktop. Have they just chosen to get out of this market altogether and concentrate their efforts elsewhere? Or is there a master plan I'm not seeing?

molmalo 14y ago
Adobe's core business is not developing platforms, but developing the editors and tools for designers. Graphic design, web design, vector, raster, doesn't matter. They make money selling their software, not deploying flash all over the web. Here you have a link to a comment I made a few months ago, about Adobe's shifting strategy regarding Flash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503774 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503774 I'll copy here some parts, so I can edit a little, mostly to adjust for current trends: ------------ Their business is to make and sell amazing Editors. CS is their main product. They bought Macromedia, just to own much of the market of Designer-oriented applications. And Macromedia filled a Gap. But from now on, they are investing heavily in building tools for HTML5. -You can see them building Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools. [1] (this link is almost a year old, so I'd expect them to have something much more advanced by now). - They are building HTML5 Editors [2] - They stopped developing Flash Player mobile. [3] In the same post where they state that they will stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, they state: Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5. Ok, ok, they also state that they will keep working in Flash for desktop. But it's like when any software company says: "We'll drop X, Y, Z so we can focus on A". That's something said to please their shareholders, so it doesn't sounds like "As our products are no longer needed, we'll just kill them". If you are a guest inside the browser, and the browser developer just throws you away (iOS, Windows 8 in Metro, only running in whitelist-pages), you have to move somewhere else. Adobe just wants to keep selling their Creative Suite. So, the best thing for them to do, is to focus on HTML5, because they now know that Flash is doomed sooner or later. And they are doing it. I expect to see in the near future something like Adobe Flash Professional but designed for HTML5. [1] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/ [2] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ [3] http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.htm... One more thing: Imagine for a moment that you are Adobe. You have an amazing suite of products, and a few of them are based on Flash. You realize that the browser developers have chosen to work and invest in something else. You go through all 5 stages of grief [4]. You deny it, you get angry, you bargain, you get depressed, but finally at least, you accept it. You HAVE to adapt and you have to work with them. But you won't have anything to sell for at least 1 or 2 years. And you still have this wonderful suite on the market. What do you do? Do you go out and yell: DON'T BUY IT! WAIT UNTIL WE RELEASE OUR FUTURE-PROOF PRODUCT!!! Of course not!!! You say We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences But at the same time, in the same paragraph you say: We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged. Read it again: a smooth transition to HTML5. TRANSITION. That's their way to say: "Keep buying and using our products, while we develop our HTML5 editors. Then, you can buy our new products and move to HTML5 too." They have went through the last phase. They have accepted it. And they are adapting, good for them :) [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

listic 14y ago

I'm afraid the reason Flash works poorly on platforms other than Win32 and Adobe is dropping the platform support is that they don't have the people that understand their code anymore, and there's noone to make it run (properly) on new platforms.

rachelbythebay 14y ago
If you had a choice, would you work on a project like that? Some of these projects spell doom when they show up on a resume because they're already associated with badness. Once that happens, good luck getting any good people to work on it. As you can see, such a situation can sustain itself. I call it "The Bozo Loop", incidentally.
- illumin8 14y ago
  That's not really correct. Senior Mobile Software Developer, Adobe Corporation would look good on almost any resume.

EnderMB 14y ago

It appears that no one who has commented so far has used Flash on ICS. I use Flash on my Galaxy Nexus, and it runs perfectly fine for everything I want to look at. Sure, it's rubbish for things like games and full-flash websites (the latter should be long gone by now anyway) but for watching Flash videos on news websites it's fantastic, and it works just as well as it does on the desktop. I want Flash gone as much as the next guy, but video on HTML5 is no more usable.

molmalo 14y ago
Video on mobile browsers should launch a video player like YouTube does when you follow a link their site. But also there should exist an attribute to avoid this for some cases.
- EnderMB 14y ago
  YouTube isn't the only Flash video player though. What if you click a Vimeo link? What about a link on the BBC? It would be ideal if there were a good native solution for all videos, but I can imagine this to be quite a hard problem.
  - molmalo 14y ago
    I said "a video player" meaning a generic one. like when you click an flv link or rtsp, that launches the stock video app in my phone (ics)

mbq 14y ago

I can't understand why they haven't just made FP open source... Flash on the web is maybe dead, but it is still usable for kiosks, games and AIR-related stuff (AIR used to be a best idea for platform-independent wrapper of active PDFs, thus killing it is a strike into this technology). So it is possible to sustain the Flash market for years with minimal costs...

LukaD 14y ago

And I confirm that I will turn off flash in all my browsers now.

illumin8 14y ago

It's funny listening to the doublespeak from Android apologists who lambasted iOS for not having Flash. Now, in Android fanboy world, it's somehow a good thing that Adobe is removing it? Steve Jobs was right all along.

cletus 14y ago

Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible user experience. One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature. Flash isn't horrible per se. It's horrible because Adobe is completely incompetent in making it run stably and on platforms other than Windows (and even there it's a stretch). Were they competent and the Flash experience just worked, I'd be fine with it. The suckiness of Flash is what's driving the adoption of HTML5/JS because, let's face it, HTML5/JS isn't exactly a mature platform yet. I just wish there was a way I could run a browser with Flash even installed without being bugged by "You're missing plugins. Would you like to install them?" Flashblock, Click-to-Flash and the like help but I'd rather not have the software installed at all. It makes me sad that Chrome bundles Flash and can't have it conveniently extracted either. To be fair, Apple didn't kill Flash (much as I'd like to give them credit for it). Adobe did.

radley 14y ago
So much hate. The worst side of HN always comes out when Flash comes up.
talmand 14y ago
But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on? Is it a matter of a Flash app that's badly designed? Because that's not Adobe's fault. If one were to duplicate the app's horrible user experience over to iOS does that mean the user experience for iOS apps can be considered as horrible? If I write some bad javascript that causes the browser to consistently crash does that mean that javascript or even the browser sucks? Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature for you. Let's not assume what's good for you must be good for everyone else. I for one have never had much of a problem with Flash on the hardware that I use, but in some circles a negative opinion always outweighs a positive one. The complaints about the problems you describe just running the Flash player on several different platforms are rather well deserved. It does seem that Adobe has decided at some point to drop the ball on the whole thing. But the player does support backwards compatibility all the way back to the beginning. I've always thought that possibly the majority of their problems relate to that. They should try just ripping out support for anything that uses versions less than actionscript 3 for a leaner plugin. But, this statement does seem more about the Flash player itself in the browser. It doesn't necessarily mean that Flash, as in the platform, will die. It'll probably live on as its own platform that requires something like Adobe Air to run on some hardware. Also, almost everything you hate about Flash's "user experience" will live on in the canvas tag. Unless I misunderstand what you mean by user experience.

bbayer 14y ago

Flash is a platform and it is very unique virtual machine. It has its own features. Since it is a virtual machine it has great potential. I think most problematic part that Adobe has to face is fragmentation. It is very complex task to maintain a complex VM ( which consists of very high level graphics capabilities) to run smoothly on every single hardware. Flash has provided lots of great stuff which is not provided by any platform before. Even now there is no any other choice for specific tasks like P2P video.

thethimble 14y ago

This is a good move. I'm glad Adobe is coming to terms with the end of Flash. Moving resources away from Flash to other areas where Adobe is successful is a win for everyone.

prioris 14y ago

If Adobe allows Google to adopt flash and continue support to develop and support it then I don't see any problem. Android is Google's baby so they need to adopt the flash development. Adobe is fecked up if they don't allow it. As far Flash being terrible. I have never had any negative experiences. This blanket negative view of flash is just hype. It is used all over the place. In the hands of a bad programmer, any application can be terrible. Performance tests between flash and html5 don't show much advantage to using html5. The PRIMARY and ONLY reason for moving to html5 is that it is not proprietary. As far as security hole, it was put there intentionally. Windows OS is one big security hole so it is like pointing to a tree in a forest. Other reasons are frivolous. So we should move towards html5 but keep flash player working on all platforms until full migration of internet occurs to html5. There is simply too much flash content so it will take a long time to migrate.