Flash Player exits Android

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-19267140

by equilibrium • 14 years ago

132 72 14 years ago

lmm• 14 years 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.

omh3• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

podperson• 14 years 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.

nicholassmith2• 14 years 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.

GFischer2• 14 years 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_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."

nicholassmith2• 14 years 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.

wallflower• 14 years 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

Evbn6• 14 years ago

Ask your local webdev. Restaurant owners love Flash. They insist on it.

avar• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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/

rm999• 14 years ago

I'd say they are more indifferent than clueless. I've read that adobe makes about 5-10% of its revenue from flash. They can build html5 tools (see edge.adobe.com) and still retain their core business, and hence profits. I wouldn't be surprised if they have been removing resources from flash for years now.

orangecat• 14 years ago

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.

That wasn't entirely their fault. Apple actually did promise a 64-bit Carbon and included it in developer previews, but yanked it shortly before Leopard shipped.

fosap3• 14 years ago

>hey 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.

That is true, but on the other hand it looks to me that try to scare developers away by charging them for using it (That includes that they have to open their books, who likes to do that?). I still think they are pretty clueless. Also I wonder why I should use Flash for platform independed game development, steam for Linux seems to be around the corner.

saurik2• 14 years ago

> 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

Yet, they still managed to do it before Apple got around to making iTunes use Cocoa ("oh, the irony", right?). The reality of the situtuation is that sometimes, even for flagship products, even for first-party products, sometimes portability is a critical concern, and Cocoa's reliance on Objective-C makes it very difficult to nigh-unto-impossible to not simply end up with tons of code duplication.

Auguste• 14 years ago

My thoughts exactly. Are they trying to kill their own product? It seems to me that Android is one of the few platforms that would still welcome it.

dmcoffee• 14 years ago

Yea right...why will they try to even think of this? They are on a suicide mission by stopping support.

roc• 14 years ago

Purveyors of "premium copy-protected video" use Flash on the desktop because the process of distributing, installing and supporting PC software is a giant pain in the ass, fraught with problems and security risks, to the point that users no longer do it.

On mobile, users love apps and distributing and supporting them is far, far easier.

Further, flash runs so poorly on mobile devices, and has for so long, that anyone serious about their "premium copy-protected video" jumped-ship for a dedicate app years ago.

So it doesn't matter what Adobe does. No-one is going back to mobile Flash at this point. Providers' app investments have been made, the same source content (h.264 video) is used in both places, and they get far more out of their own dedicated app.

Further, Adobe's money is made via content creation apps. Flash was a means to that end, but they don't need it. They can still make money off production tools, particularly while people still need to maintain a content pipeline that churns out resources that work on mobile and desktop.

andy_herbert• 14 years ago

What makes you think they haven't tried and failed to make it work (well) on mobile?

Maybe in the cost benefit analysis it would be better to devote time and resources on HTML toolsets.

zmmmmm• 14 years ago

This is my conclusion. There was a period when they were making a lot of noise about how they were making Flash "touch friendly", releasing Air across all the platforms, etc. As time went on Flash became tolerable (and useful!) but never really "good" and I suspect the real killer was that Adobe started to see dire feedback in their sales pipeline because people were prioritising iPad and Adobe could not offer a universal solution. Then I think, as others have said, Google decided Flash support was hurting Android instead of helping it (once you have critical mass, cross platform tools become a competitive disadvantage instead of the reverse) and probably told Adobe they were on their own and that was enough for them to decide to kill it, and killing it swiftly and making money from people forced to convert was better than killing it slowly.

I do think they really tried, for a while, but it just didn't work.

moheeb• 14 years ago

Adobe has been, and probably will always be, one of the worst software development companies in existence. It is only within the last 5 years or so that they have become even remotely competent. I do believe all decent programs they have ever published (think Photoshop) have been bought from another company and rebranded under the Adobe 'seal of death'.

Evbn6• 14 years ago

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop

Adobe employees created Photoshop 20 years ago, and was tremendously successful until Flash died in the last five years.

Flash and Dreamweaver were acquisition s.

mathieuh• 14 years 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.

Newky2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Try Dolphin Browser !

gcp• 14 years 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.

Newky2• 14 years ago

Dolphin Browser was working for a long time, but I believe they updated the browser since disabling flash support.

WayneDB• 14 years 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• 14 years 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

andybak2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

It was like the OS/2 supporting Windows binaries debacle all over again.

malkia• 14 years 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.

omaranto2• 14 years 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.)

ta121213• 14 years ago

There do exist people that want to use YouTube and Hulu on Linux, and that's hard to do without Flash.

abrahamsen• 14 years ago

YouTube on Linux without flash works fine these days.

fosap3• 14 years ago

I'm a Linux user, have no flash installed and use Youtube. It's not as good as i could be, but it works. Most content is displayed with HTML5, for the other stuff i use mplayer witch is a bit hacky, but works for me.

bunderbunder• 14 years ago

I don't think I would have even noticed my tablet didn't have Flash.

I noticed that mine did. It was impossible to ignore. My tablet would frequently become unresponsive when I went to sites that had Flash content. Or sites with Flash content would be unusable because they relied on mouseovers in a way that doesn't work with touchscreen devices.

After a week I got around to figuring out how to disable Flash on the device. At which point my desire to give up on the Android tablet and get an iPad after all diminished considerably.

chimi• 14 years 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.

jonaphin• 14 years 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?

Flash Player exits Android

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