10 ms·

Flash Player exits Android

132 points by equilibrium 14y ago

lmm 14y ago
The BBC could solve its android problems in a microsecond if it wanted to - just have it play the same unencrypted stream that they give to iDevices.
- omh 14y ago
  There was (perhaps still is?) a long-running battle as the BBC added extra protections around the iOS stream and users built various scripts to exploit this and download episodes. For example, I think that the BBC site uses the installed certificates to verify that the player is really an iPhone. Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically.
  - king_jester 14y ago
    > Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically. I agree about the difficult this poses. Given the kind of wide range of Android devices, simple content protection might not really be possible. Verifying a device as Android doesn't really tell you much about the kind of hardware that it is running on, so for business types this kind of uncertainty makes them unwilling to try alternatives. Big Content will not really care about Android until it is easy enough and/or profitable enough to service. Given that Android doesn't have an easy way to implement DRM schemes right now, it is unlikely that many companies will be rushing forward to work on Android until some easier solutions are available.
    - omh 14y ago
      The interesting thing is that the BBC were happy to get iPlayer working on the iPhone originally. That didn't have any meaningful DRM, at least nothing that couldn't be done to a similar degree on Android. I suspect that this is because iPhones are "cool" and someone high up just demanded that it should happen.
      - andybak 14y ago
        They claim they are currently testing a non-Flash Android player so something has been resolved internally.
      - malsme 14y ago
        Weren't iPhones better locked down at that time? I'm thinking it was a calculated risk. Much like start-ups will do risky things when they first launch. iPlayer was effectively an internal start-up too. Targeting iPhone is like supporting a cable company's set top box, so highly prized because it's straightforward; whereas targeting Android is like supporting a myriad of smart TVs.
        omh 14y ago
        Targeting iPhone is like supporting a cable company's set top box, so highly prized because it's straightforward; whereas targeting Android is like supporting a myriad of smart TVs. That's certainly true for supportability. It's easy to test and confirm that it works on the 2 or 3 iphone models, less so for all the Android devices. That's potentially bad from a PR point of view. For drm-esque security it makes little difference though. The 'attack' in this case was from people running a script and pretending to be an iPhone, not from people running unauthorised software on iPhones themselves.
- podperson 14y ago
  The BBC (website) has a long, sad history of picking crappy media formats. They used Real Audio and Video long after that was clearly a bad idea, then when they had to switch away they picked Flash.
joeycfan 14y ago
Flash is in retreat. Adobe should look into that.
nicholassmith 14y ago
Flash is always going to have a place on the desktop, but as a developer having to make a choice between Flash & HTML5 or just HTML5 is going to be pretty simple for a big chunk of purposes. Lets hope Adobe focus on HTML5 tools.
- GFischer 14y ago
  "Flash is always going to have a place on the desktop" What for? Any developer for Flash now sees the sign on the wall. It will not die off, but it will become niche/irrelevant. http://www.pcworld.com/article/243529/the_beginning_of_the_end_of_adobe_flash_player.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/243529/the_beginning_of_the_e... "The things Adobe is working on for desktops--advanced 3D gaming and premium copy-protected video--already exist in mobile through native apps and HTML5. As mobile and desktop platforms merge, Flash Player will get overtaken."
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    There's still things you can do in Flash that can't be achieved in HTML5, so until there's the ability to layer ad's in videos effectively for YouTube or strap DRM into the streams Flash will be a goto choice.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Div with opacity <1 , that is an overlay, isn't it?
  - wallflower 14y ago
    One of my friends who made a living as Flash consultant for about a decade - he has transitioned - last year, he had one Flash project - the rest were HTML5
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Ask your local webdev. Restaurant owners love Flash. They insist on it.
avar 14y ago
I continue to be amazed at the effort Adobe is going to to make their own platform irrelevant. They claim to want to focus on "premium copy-protected video" but do they really think that only targeting that to desktop systems when mobile adoption is skyrocketing is a good move?
- w0utert 14y ago
  Adobe seems to be pretty much clueless when it comes to Flash if you ask me. They never bothered to make a solid version of the plugin for Linux and OS X until the whole Flash-on-iOS debate started and Flash really didn't need more bad press. Then they tried get Flash on the millions of different hardware configurations on mobile, even though none of the existing Flash content was made for touch, none of the handsets had enough power to run most Flash content well, and all despite all the trouble they had supporting just the 3 major desktop OS-es. All of this effort even though Adobe doesn't make any money on Flash player at all, only on the authoring tools, which everyone could see is a dwindling market now that you can do so much on the web without any plugins. I think their current strategy on the desktop is not so much 'content-protected video' (Flash did that 15 years ago already), but high-end gaming. They have some seriously impressive 3D stuff in the pipeline, which coupled with Air would finally make some good use of Flash as a platform-independent way to create games. But my guess is that it's all too little, too late, and that the market for cross-platform advanced 3D graphics development is pretty small. The really big guys that would make good use of it already have their native engines ported to those OS'es that matter, and the small developers probably don't have the budget to create games that really benefit from the technology. It's weird to see how Adobe seems to screw up so often, because they really make some very good products. The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
  - mistercow 14y ago
    >The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version. I think Adobe really believed they could strong-arm Apple on that. I think they were spoiled by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility at all costs[1], and thought that surely it would hurt Apple more than Adobe to let PS languish. I think they were so sure of this, in fact, that they made few arrangements for the contingency that Apple might just call their bluff. So when that happened, they had an uphill battle to fight. [1] This story comes to mind: http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/18/dont-build-apis/ http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/18/dont-build-apis/
mathieuh 14y ago
Android users get screwed over with the iPlayer app. Not everyone wants to install Flash (and now no one can even if they want to), yet for some reason they feel need to serve the video in a different way to the perfectly fine iOS stream.
Newky 14y ago
This is a huge issue for me that I recently faced when I bought a google nexus. Flash cannot be found in the jellybean market, and the only way to get flash working is to install it through apk and use a developemental firefox build. Even at that, the quality is blurry. I know flash is dying but unfortunately a number of sites (mostly video sites) which I frequent regularly have not made a full (if any) conversion meaning there is a whole sector of the internet that is not accessible from my tablet. As I bought it as a media consuming device, I expected less of a harsh cut from Adobe and Google.
- bjonathan 14y ago
  Try Dolphin Browser !
  - Newky 14y ago
    Dolphin Browser was working for a long time, but I believe they updated the browser since disabling flash support.
  - gcp 14y ago
    Unless I'm missing something, that won't achieve anything as it's using the built-in WebKit which probably had Flash support removed (otherwise he could just have used the built-in browser). I suppose that's why he's using development builds of Firefox - they have their own engine. Opera would work as well.
- WayneDB 14y ago
  Firefox Beta + Flash 11 is working very well on my Nexus 7. Streaming video is excellent and the user interfaces are quite responsive. It's not as stable as the desktop version, but I don't see any problems with the quality of video.
rjzzleep 14y ago
well nice going google, first effectively kill or setback html5 video by torpedoing everyone with their anti h264 campaign and then get f*ed up the bum by them. (here's a guy who 2 years ago said that flash is effectively dead long live html5 video) pps. i won't really miss flash. but i do miss the time where every site had h264 vids up
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
andybak 14y ago
Here's the thing. It initially seemed like a good thing for Android to support Flash but as time as gone on it's become apparent that the end result is a lot of sites produced a premium iOS experience and sub-par Flash based one for Android. Whether this flawed experience was due to limitations in the platform or lack of effort on behalf of the service I wouldn't like to say but it happened either way. Hopefully now with Flash unequivocally end-of-life'd (on mobile at the very least) we might see Android devices being served the same experience as iOS devices.
- smashing 14y ago
  It was like the OS/2 supporting Windows binaries debacle all over again.
  - malkia 14y ago
    Not the same - both were desktop, and running on close hardware. Contrast this with flash - Lots of flash apps require vast amount of memory, download not fit for mobile, and most importantly clicks done with mouse. For all other cases it's fine.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      Those problems have almost nothing to do with Flash and everything to do with complex desktop apps not running on mobile. It is possible to write light Flash and heavy DHTML (hello Gmail).
omaranto 14y ago
Honestly, I don't think I would have even noticed my tablet didn't have Flash. I don't have Flash on my Linux laptop (I use Chromium there) and haven't missed it --its nothing ideological: if I ever need Flash I'll install it right away. On the Windows netbooks we do have Flash but only because there we use Chrome instead of Chromium and it comes with Flash. I don't think I actually use it for anything other than playing video games with my son, which is not very often (his favorite games now are puzzle apps he plays on an iPod Touch, not that he plays those that much either). (Off topic: now that I mentioned it all, it felt like we have a lot of hardware, but then I realized altogether I payed less than the cost of a high end laptop for it.)
- ta12121 14y ago
  There do exist people that want to use YouTube and Hulu on Linux, and that's hard to do without Flash.
  - abrahamsen 14y ago
    YouTube on Linux without flash works fine these days.
    - ta12121 14y ago
      It certainly didn't a few weeks ago when I tried it.
    - DeepDuh 14y ago
      Have they come around offering everything in html5 now? I tried it about a year ago and it only had a small percentage of the content I watch.
      - greyboy 14y ago
        My totally unscientific and anecdotal input is that, for what I end up watching (5-10 videos/week), it's in the 50-75% range (for HTML5 videos being available). Of course, that doesn't mean much and I always have a Windows virtual machine running for just these scenarios.
chimi 14y ago
Flash still works on my HP TouchPad, but it's not that good. Video almost always lags the audio which makes them awful to watch and Video playback is the only think that matters with flash anymore and it fails at that so, I really see no purpose for it. I wish all the sites would just adopt native video.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jonaphin 14y ago
Adobe took the pragmatic approach. The HTML standard is maturing to the point where Flash will become redundant technology sooner rather than later for regular media consumption. Pulling the cord on Flash Mobile is the right thing to do. Seriously, which relevant company still builds anything for mobile on Flash?

132 points by equilibrium 14y ago

lmm 14y ago

The BBC could solve its android problems in a microsecond if it wanted to - just have it play the same unencrypted stream that they give to iDevices.

omh 14y ago
There was (perhaps still is?) a long-running battle as the BBC added extra protections around the iOS stream and users built various scripts to exploit this and download episodes. For example, I think that the BBC site uses the installed certificates to verify that the player is really an iPhone. Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically.
- king_jester 14y ago
  > Obviously all of this is somewhat pointless, but to work on Android they'd either have to come up with an equivalent method or turn off one or more layers of "protection". That's probably difficult politically, if not technically. I agree about the difficult this poses. Given the kind of wide range of Android devices, simple content protection might not really be possible. Verifying a device as Android doesn't really tell you much about the kind of hardware that it is running on, so for business types this kind of uncertainty makes them unwilling to try alternatives. Big Content will not really care about Android until it is easy enough and/or profitable enough to service. Given that Android doesn't have an easy way to implement DRM schemes right now, it is unlikely that many companies will be rushing forward to work on Android until some easier solutions are available.
  - omh 14y ago
    The interesting thing is that the BBC were happy to get iPlayer working on the iPhone originally. That didn't have any meaningful DRM, at least nothing that couldn't be done to a similar degree on Android. I suspect that this is because iPhones are "cool" and someone high up just demanded that it should happen.
    - andybak 14y ago
      They claim they are currently testing a non-Flash Android player so something has been resolved internally.
    - malsme 14y ago
      Weren't iPhones better locked down at that time? I'm thinking it was a calculated risk. Much like start-ups will do risky things when they first launch. iPlayer was effectively an internal start-up too. Targeting iPhone is like supporting a cable company's set top box, so highly prized because it's straightforward; whereas targeting Android is like supporting a myriad of smart TVs.
      - omh 14y ago
        Targeting iPhone is like supporting a cable company's set top box, so highly prized because it's straightforward; whereas targeting Android is like supporting a myriad of smart TVs. That's certainly true for supportability. It's easy to test and confirm that it works on the 2 or 3 iphone models, less so for all the Android devices. That's potentially bad from a PR point of view. For drm-esque security it makes little difference though. The 'attack' in this case was from people running a script and pretending to be an iPhone, not from people running unauthorised software on iPhones themselves.
podperson 14y ago
The BBC (website) has a long, sad history of picking crappy media formats. They used Real Audio and Video long after that was clearly a bad idea, then when they had to switch away they picked Flash.

joeycfan 14y ago

Flash is in retreat. Adobe should look into that.

nicholassmith 14y ago

Flash is always going to have a place on the desktop, but as a developer having to make a choice between Flash & HTML5 or just HTML5 is going to be pretty simple for a big chunk of purposes. Lets hope Adobe focus on HTML5 tools.

GFischer 14y ago
"Flash is always going to have a place on the desktop" What for? Any developer for Flash now sees the sign on the wall. It will not die off, but it will become niche/irrelevant. http://www.pcworld.com/article/243529/the_beginning_of_the_end_of_adobe_flash_player.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/243529/the_beginning_of_the_e... "The things Adobe is working on for desktops--advanced 3D gaming and premium copy-protected video--already exist in mobile through native apps and HTML5. As mobile and desktop platforms merge, Flash Player will get overtaken."
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  There's still things you can do in Flash that can't be achieved in HTML5, so until there's the ability to layer ad's in videos effectively for YouTube or strap DRM into the streams Flash will be a goto choice.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Div with opacity <1 , that is an overlay, isn't it?
- wallflower 14y ago
  One of my friends who made a living as Flash consultant for about a decade - he has transitioned - last year, he had one Flash project - the rest were HTML5
- Evbn 14y ago
  Ask your local webdev. Restaurant owners love Flash. They insist on it.

avar 14y ago

I continue to be amazed at the effort Adobe is going to to make their own platform irrelevant. They claim to want to focus on "premium copy-protected video" but do they really think that only targeting that to desktop systems when mobile adoption is skyrocketing is a good move?

w0utert 14y ago
Adobe seems to be pretty much clueless when it comes to Flash if you ask me. They never bothered to make a solid version of the plugin for Linux and OS X until the whole Flash-on-iOS debate started and Flash really didn't need more bad press. Then they tried get Flash on the millions of different hardware configurations on mobile, even though none of the existing Flash content was made for touch, none of the handsets had enough power to run most Flash content well, and all despite all the trouble they had supporting just the 3 major desktop OS-es. All of this effort even though Adobe doesn't make any money on Flash player at all, only on the authoring tools, which everyone could see is a dwindling market now that you can do so much on the web without any plugins. I think their current strategy on the desktop is not so much 'content-protected video' (Flash did that 15 years ago already), but high-end gaming. They have some seriously impressive 3D stuff in the pipeline, which coupled with Air would finally make some good use of Flash as a platform-independent way to create games. But my guess is that it's all too little, too late, and that the market for cross-platform advanced 3D graphics development is pretty small. The really big guys that would make good use of it already have their native engines ported to those OS'es that matter, and the small developers probably don't have the budget to create games that really benefit from the technology. It's weird to see how Adobe seems to screw up so often, because they really make some very good products. The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
- mistercow 14y ago
  >The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version. I think Adobe really believed they could strong-arm Apple on that. I think they were spoiled by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility at all costs[1], and thought that surely it would hurt Apple more than Adobe to let PS languish. I think they were so sure of this, in fact, that they made few arrangements for the contingency that Apple might just call their bluff. So when that happened, they had an uphill battle to fight. [1] This story comes to mind: http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/18/dont-build-apis/ http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/18/dont-build-apis/

mathieuh 14y ago

Android users get screwed over with the iPlayer app. Not everyone wants to install Flash (and now no one can even if they want to), yet for some reason they feel need to serve the video in a different way to the perfectly fine iOS stream.

Newky 14y ago

This is a huge issue for me that I recently faced when I bought a google nexus. Flash cannot be found in the jellybean market, and the only way to get flash working is to install it through apk and use a developemental firefox build. Even at that, the quality is blurry. I know flash is dying but unfortunately a number of sites (mostly video sites) which I frequent regularly have not made a full (if any) conversion meaning there is a whole sector of the internet that is not accessible from my tablet. As I bought it as a media consuming device, I expected less of a harsh cut from Adobe and Google.

bjonathan 14y ago
Try Dolphin Browser !
- Newky 14y ago
  Dolphin Browser was working for a long time, but I believe they updated the browser since disabling flash support.
- gcp 14y ago
  Unless I'm missing something, that won't achieve anything as it's using the built-in WebKit which probably had Flash support removed (otherwise he could just have used the built-in browser). I suppose that's why he's using development builds of Firefox - they have their own engine. Opera would work as well.
WayneDB 14y ago
Firefox Beta + Flash 11 is working very well on my Nexus 7. Streaming video is excellent and the user interfaces are quite responsive. It's not as stable as the desktop version, but I don't see any problems with the quality of video.

rjzzleep 14y ago

well nice going google, first effectively kill or setback html5 video by torpedoing everyone with their anti h264 campaign and then get f*ed up the bum by them. (here's a guy who 2 years ago said that flash is effectively dead long live html5 video) pps. i won't really miss flash. but i do miss the time where every site had h264 vids up

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

andybak 14y ago

Here's the thing. It initially seemed like a good thing for Android to support Flash but as time as gone on it's become apparent that the end result is a lot of sites produced a premium iOS experience and sub-par Flash based one for Android. Whether this flawed experience was due to limitations in the platform or lack of effort on behalf of the service I wouldn't like to say but it happened either way. Hopefully now with Flash unequivocally end-of-life'd (on mobile at the very least) we might see Android devices being served the same experience as iOS devices.

smashing 14y ago
It was like the OS/2 supporting Windows binaries debacle all over again.
- malkia 14y ago
  Not the same - both were desktop, and running on close hardware. Contrast this with flash - Lots of flash apps require vast amount of memory, download not fit for mobile, and most importantly clicks done with mouse. For all other cases it's fine.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    Those problems have almost nothing to do with Flash and everything to do with complex desktop apps not running on mobile. It is possible to write light Flash and heavy DHTML (hello Gmail).

omaranto 14y ago

Honestly, I don't think I would have even noticed my tablet didn't have Flash. I don't have Flash on my Linux laptop (I use Chromium there) and haven't missed it --its nothing ideological: if I ever need Flash I'll install it right away. On the Windows netbooks we do have Flash but only because there we use Chrome instead of Chromium and it comes with Flash. I don't think I actually use it for anything other than playing video games with my son, which is not very often (his favorite games now are puzzle apps he plays on an iPod Touch, not that he plays those that much either). (Off topic: now that I mentioned it all, it felt like we have a lot of hardware, but then I realized altogether I payed less than the cost of a high end laptop for it.)

ta12121 14y ago
There do exist people that want to use YouTube and Hulu on Linux, and that's hard to do without Flash.
- abrahamsen 14y ago
  YouTube on Linux without flash works fine these days.
  - ta12121 14y ago
    It certainly didn't a few weeks ago when I tried it.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago
    Have they come around offering everything in html5 now? I tried it about a year ago and it only had a small percentage of the content I watch.
    - greyboy 14y ago
      My totally unscientific and anecdotal input is that, for what I end up watching (5-10 videos/week), it's in the 50-75% range (for HTML5 videos being available). Of course, that doesn't mean much and I always have a Windows virtual machine running for just these scenarios.

chimi 14y ago

Flash still works on my HP TouchPad, but it's not that good. Video almost always lags the audio which makes them awful to watch and Video playback is the only think that matters with flash anymore and it fails at that so, I really see no purpose for it. I wish all the sites would just adopt native video.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jonaphin 14y ago

Adobe took the pragmatic approach. The HTML standard is maturing to the point where Flash will become redundant technology sooner rather than later for regular media consumption. Pulling the cord on Flash Mobile is the right thing to do. Seriously, which relevant company still builds anything for mobile on Flash?