And so, Flash on mobile is now completely dead. “There will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1. Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th.”
I highly expect Adobe will release a new software or a new version of Flash Studio able to target HTML5.
Die Flash die! Burn!
Ding dong the witch is dead
This is an example of a business totally dropping the ball on a major focal point of their business. They COULD have put more effort into making Flash perform well on more platforms, using less CPU time, more acceleration hardware, etc. But they didn’t. They COULD have open sourced it, but they didn’t. They even had a good shot to get it right on Android, and they flubbed that too.
It makes me wonder if this was intentional. Did Adobe execs decide that Flash and Flash-related tools just weren’t the source of enough revenue to take seriously? Or did they just screw themselves out of incompetence?
I guess it’s a completely unmaintainable code base. Improving it is probably impossible and open sourcing would be embarrassing. It’s from the 90’s.
Edited 2012-06-29 20:34 UTC
It is not a valid argument at all.
Almost all software we depend upon has been implemented in the 80s and 90s.
Java is so 90s; Linux is 90s based in an OS created in the 70s.
Windows is 90s; .NET is 2000s but runs on top of Windows…
The “real world” programming languages were born at 70s and 80s.
So, telling some technology comes from the 90s sounds contemporary and really current… to me.
Photoshop, illustrator, acrobat (Creative Suite in general) is Adobe’s bread winner. Flash is just one small part, plus it’s an acquired technology (being Macromedia prior to purchase.)
I very much doubt Adobe makes any money directly from Flash content, so it’s really just the tools. If they move the tools to HTML5, they lose no money from the users who will purchase new CS upgrades and such anyway, plus they then remove the Flash stigma. Full of WIN from my viewpoint.
That seems to hardly matter – for example, the implementations of HTML5 video in desktop browsers often manage, somehow, to be more demanding on resources than Flash (which can be particularly felt on older machines; where redirecting video streams to mplayer browser plugin is still much better, anyway)
And Flash isn’t at a focal point of their business (hell, Adobe gives it away for free), tools for “creative” professionals are.
“Steve was right” is my new mantra.
You are just happy he got something right?
It’s much easier to be right when you’re also largely the one who forces said thing (which is really here: forcing apps – including essentially flash apps / games packaged with their runtime – to go solely through your distribution channel), when your own blockade suddenly makes future prospects of some technology much bleaker.
Edited 2012-07-06 22:39 UTC
Hmmm, it looks like the original article headline and its first sentence is a bit over-reaching to me. Adobe has said that nothing beyond Android 4.0.* (i.e. ICS) will have Flash support, which most certainly doesn’t equate to either “fully retire” or “completely dead” to me.
A bit more research, Thom, and you’d have even spotted a Nexus 7 chink in Adobe’s armour:
Nexus 7 release date with Android 4.1: late July 2012
Adobe’s removal of Flash from Google Play for any device that hasn’t already got Flash installed: 15th August 2012.
So there’s a 2-3 week period where Nexus 7 users will be able to install Flash from Google Play, but then probably won’t be allowed to update it after 15th August 2012. So could there be years where Nexus 7 users have an unpatched, insecure Flash after 15th August 2012?!
Also, I bet someone will make the .apk file for Flash available on the Net for download and Nexus 7 users might get to run Flash even if they buy the device after 15th August.
It should be noted that there have been numerous minor updates to Flash player on my Android 4.0.X tablet and 2.3.X phone ever since Adobe’s “we’re dropping mobile Flash” announcement many, many months ago and these will continue to appear well beyond August 2012, despite Thom’s hyperbole. What *won’t* happen is any major update to Flash on Android ever again.
Mind you, there’s a laughable Nvidia + hardware acceleration + Flash + YouTube + Linux combo that actually results in “Blue Man Group”-style videos (everyone’s faces turn blue, I kid you not):
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3164063
Would be nice if Adobe and/or fixed that one as a goodbye present to Flash on Linux too!
You dont need such a elaborate defense of Flash. Yes, it is available from http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive… and users with more knowledge could still get it but it is clear that Adobe is slowly phasing it out more and more and while it is technically going to be used for sometime still, it is dead in the sense Cobol is dead.
I know COBOL’s alive (and well?) in the financial industry; to this day banks spend a lot of money on keeping their COBOL-based stuff up and running.
But Flash is a *consumer*-oriented technology. And if consumers don’t have it on their devices, why would companies spend a lot of money to keep Flash-based stuff up and running (let alone make more of it)?
Flash’s future seems much darker than COBOL’s.
There will be a ton of Flash content still around in the web for a long time to come. Think games or whatever and that will keep the need for a Flash player alive for atleast a decade. It will be just new content that migrates over to other technologies at first and then all the actively used content will move over as well. Much of the old content wont change.
Then people are doomed to be able to access said content. Oh well, that’s what you get for putting content in proprietary formats. I won’t miss Flash at all. It’s already a pain in the ass now never mind many years from now.
There were no alternatives if you actually wanted to do something (say an action browser game 10 or 5 years ago, or video streaming site 5+ years ago – well, video had alternatives, but they were much worse*), instead of just complaining.
* and desktop browser implementations of HTML5 video somehow manage to be even more demanding on resources than Flash is – on slow or old machines, it’s still much better to just set mplayer ~plugin to hijack the playback of video streams.
Yes, there’s all that Flash content out there, but as you say, it needs a Flash player. And the point of this article is that for mobile platforms at least, there isn’t going to be one. For anyone using the web on a smart phone or tablet, that old content is effectively already dead and unusable.
Good riddance!
We need to build the world wide web with open standards.
My hatred for flash goes back a long time, frustrated to get access to some websites from my debian box.
Please keep that proprietary crap to yourselves, adobe.
I wish I could have voted you up tenfold for that comment.
Now that flash is dead, we can concentrate our efforts on killing Android. I hate it even more than flash!
Now if only HTML5 didn’t blow so much, we would have a suitable replacement.
HTML5 has no answer to paid content, how can it be considered a serious replacement.
With no Flash we will end up it a nightmare of incompatible, even more proprietary “solutions”.
It is no worse than that current disaster as Flash is now.
It strikes me that adding this functionality to HTML 5 wouldn’t actually be too difficult. All one would need is an agreed standard supported by all the major browsers (with the probable exception of any Mozilla products of course). If Microsoft, Apple, and Google settled on a standard for implementing DRM’d content in HTML 5, it wouldn’t much matter what the W3C has to say about it. It would become the de facto standard, and we’d have the best of both worlds. Of course, I doubt these companies will ever sit down to agree on anything at all, so we’ll see. At the same time, I don’t think we’re doomed to regress back to the 90’s and the hundreds of different video codecs and players we had to deal with back then. The sheer diversity of platforms from Mac and PC to various mobile options is eventually going to force some sort of universal solution out into the open. We had the problem back then, in part, because almost everyone could be counted on to be running Windows, so any player developer could just target Windows and be done. As it stands now that’s not a viable option for paid content as they’ll cut off a massive segment of potential customers. It may even have the side effect of forcing big content to actually produce a useful standard player, wouldn’t that be a shock?
I want Flash gone. I’m sick of its bloat and all the flash ads on web pages that suck my battery dry (yes I use flashblock but that shouldn’t be necessary). The situation may deteriorate for a short time, but if in the long run we get something more stable and useful, I’ll put up with the short-term pains.
DRM is a technology that in every context is related to making money, so companies that control endpoints and can impose their technology, see it as a huge profit opportunity as they can monetize just about every user. They will fight till last breath to make their solution defacto standard (to position themselves as e.g. NagraVision in DTV). I wouldn’t count on any sort of agreement soon, esp. we’re at the end of semi open personal computing platforms era.
The only case I can see it happening is:
1. some regulative body like ITU stepping in with something that is technologically compelling (hard to imagine but has once happened in case of GSM)
2. broadcasters teaming up and proposing their own standard (the fate of bbc codec doesn’t make me believer).
Edited 2012-07-03 05:51 UTC
Excellent.
I just watched EURO2012 finals through a flash player on some random page bc. sliverlight crap of the official broadcast doesn’t support my mobile device.
Guess we’re getting it backwards.
1st time I’m happy I’ll not be getting the update any time soon…
I don’t get how I can run the LOTRO and WoW clients with absolutely no problems or hiccoughs, but anything with Flash soaks up all my CPU and RAM and turns my laptop into a jet engine with the fans roaring and oven-like heat. Flash is a pile of stinky tampons. It needs to die a fast and violent death.
Its (for the most part) replacement seems often even worse – desktop browser implementations of HTML5 video somehow manage to “soak up all CPU and RAM” even more than Flash videos.
And yet, hooking up mplayer inside the browser (so mplayer will be the ~plugin that plays videos) gives much smoother experience.
What I didn’t get from the blurb nor the comments is that flash will still be around, integrated in the browsers as provided by certified ‘manufacturers’. The announcement is just saying there will no longer be a stand-alone flashplayer downloadable from the Play-store.
Quite frankly I wish Flash would die on the desktop, too.
Adobe is not killing its control over internet media, and they certainly would not do it for no reason.
They are killing the mobile devices with mobile OSen.
Look at the devices in the certified list. With Microsoft loosing on the mobile front, pushing flash back to the PC will mean you will need a PC OS on a tablet to view flash content, kinda like what MS pushes…
% cat flash_player_certified | awk -F\t ‘{print $4}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
1 Android 3.0
1 Meego 1.2
1 WebOS
2 WebTop
3 BB Tablet OS
3 Symbian OS 2
4 Symbian OS 3
8 Linux
13 Webtop
20 Android 3.1
23 Android 4.0
46 Android 3.2
121 Android 2.2
289 Android 2.3
Edited 2012-07-02 16:53 UTC