
Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right - glhaynes
http://blog.laptopmag.com/mobile-flash-fail-weak-android-player-proves-jobs-right
======
cookiecaper
Adobe is seriously doing it all wrong. They have to open-source the Flash
Player and everything around it now. They can keep the IDE proprietary if that
floats their boat, it's just a premium authoring tool, but the only way to
save Flash is to open-source like NOW. HTML5 is still young enough that an
open Flash Player and standard and protocol (RTMP) would effectively kill it.

Open-sourcing would open so many doors. Apple could modify Flash until it
worked on iOS properly, Google could modify until it worked on Android. The
reason this hasn't happened so far is that Adobe is a bottleneck nobody wants
to deal with; they just consider basically impossible to get Flash Player on
mobile because Adobe doesn't have the structure or the talent to do it
correctly, and there is no other option except to let Adobe do it. An open
Flash would open many doors, awesome adaptations, deployments, and uses that
we can't yet think up would come out of it, and all the while Adobe would keep
selling its IDE (probably selling more, actually, because Flash will then do
cool stuff that everyone wants).

I don't know why they don't do this. Flash Player is already basically free,
all of the money from Flash comes from the IDE Adobe sells. Keep the IDE
locked up if you want, Adobe, but every second you keep the Player locked up
you are killing Flash that much more, and when nobody uses Flash nobody is
going to buy your IDE.

I know there are free software Flash players out there, but it's not the same.
It's like saying nobody needs cooperation from nvidia because of nouveau.
While a noble effort with meaningful results, vendor support still gets you
much, much farther ahead.

If Adobe knows what's good for them they will be opening the Flash Player as
quickly as they possibly can. They are going to be very sorry that they
didn't. They probably will eventually take this route as a last-ditch effort
when Flash content has dipped like 80% and been replaced by HTML5/JS, but that
will be too late. This is Adobe's last chance, they must open it now if they
expect any kind of future from it.

Flash is too big for Adobe alone, and if they don't want the whole thing to
crash and burn totally and have that revenue dry up, they need to open ASAP.
This should be the number one priority at Adobe.

~~~
daleharvey
its already far far too late for adobe, if they had open sourced 10 years ago,
there wouldnt be a html5 video and canvas, flash would be the standard.

open sourcing it now will help them stay relevant for longer but it will be a
band aid, proprietary tools will be replaced by web standards on the internet
thats more obvious now than it ever was. flash can innovate by raising the
limit on what you can do, but there is a roof on that functionality the gap
between it and where web standards are now is getting smaller and smaller.

~~~
nanairo
I may be wrong, but I think Adobe 10 years ago was pushing for things like
html5 video and canvas... because Flash was Macromedia's. It was a case of:
the enemy of my enemy is my friend. (They were also one of the first big
companies to push SVG from what I remember).

~~~
daleharvey
heh not the first time I have made that mistake, when I say "they" I mean
macromedia / whoever happened to be in charge of flash at the time of whatever
incidence we are talking about.

~~~
nanairo
But I am not sure Flash was really comparable to what it is today back in the
days of Macromedia. Did we have Youtube and company back then? My gut feeling
is that Adobe there went from "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" to "hey,
wait a minute: we could actually BUY it, and CONTROL it".

Adobe bought Macromedia and suddenly Flash was great and amazing and they
integrated it with the rest of the their portfolio.

The question I am trying to put is: back in the days of Macromedia, do you
think they would have clanged on Flash on mobile like they life depended on
it?

(this is not a rhetorical question, btw, I am really wondering: I didn't
follow Adobe and Macromedia much in those days)

~~~
daleharvey
I only ever seen the flash progression in those times from peeking over the
wall at the other side so people might be able to correct me, but I dont think
the adobe acquisition did flash a whole lot of favours, it managed to get its
98% etc penetration well before adobe was ever around.

Back in those days flash vs html for plain websites was a serious debate,
under adobe while video has got massively popular, flash has been further and
further marginalised as a tool almost only for games, adverts and video.

I certainly couldnt see macromedia open sourcing flash any more than I could
see adobe doing it without this pressure, if anything I think macromedia were
even more aggressive with shutting down alternative players, at that time they
were competing with html which broke in every browser, they wanted to make
certain it was write once run everywhere.

To be honest I am entirely biased, but its always seemed obvious to me that
open web standards will very very slowly replace virtually everything
proprietary on the web. right now there is not one decent web publishing tool
and I am pretty stunned that adobe havent stepped up to produce one yet
(dreamweaver does not count, and neither does flash exporting canvas). Heres
hoping whoever does makes sure it works on linux :)

------
dasil003
Shelving the question of Adobe's strategy or competence for a moment, I think
this review is indicative of Apple's competitive advantage.

Assuming Adobe had infinite time and resources, could they make Flash run well
for all content on every mobile device? Of course not, they are hamstrung from
legacy support as well as variances in hardware and software stacks they have
to deal with. But just like Microsoft they are beholden to their legacy
software and deploy base.

Meanwhile when Apple decides to go mobile they start from scratch. They design
the hardware, the software, using open technologies where appropriate, but
rolling their own closed-source secret sauce. Then they play hardball with
Adobe and any other potential heavyweight partners because they own the entire
product stack from design to retail. If some low-level tester finds a choppy
video on a prototype iPhone, it takes about 5 minutes to escalate the issue to
the people who can fix it directly. Meanwhile, if there are hardware problems
with Flash, Adobe has to go talk to whoknowswhat podunk handset manufacturer
and hope that they listen.

Looking at this way it's basically impossible for Adobe to craft a consumer
experience like Apple. Microsoft has a similar problem. Pure SaaS helps with
the legacy problem, thus making it possible for pure software companies like
Google and Facebook to at least iterate quickly.

~~~
sprout
It's equally impossible for Apple to craft a consumer experience with as wide
a reach as Adobe or Microsoft. Apple is not going to get more than 30% market
share with their present strategy.

MS/Adobe are unlikely to fall below 60% (especially since this is not a zero-
sum game.)

~~~
OpieCunningham
Whether Apple can achieve greater than 30% market share is debatable, not as
equally impossible as it is for Adobe to ensure the level of compatibility and
legacy support for Flash, and ultimately irrelevant.

Adobe can maintain at least 60% market share - on PC's (Mac + Windows). But
they cannot achieve that on mobile devices.

------
IdeaHamster
I would give anything for someone to explain to me why the right move for
Adobe wasn't to simply accept HTML5, pivot from Flash to making killer HTML5
authoring tools, and maybe even provide a way for people to take their
existing Flash projects and repurpose them to HTML5?

How would that have been worse then trying to wedge Flash where it doesn't
belong?

~~~
WilliamLP
The much glossed-over answer is that JavaScript and HTML just isn't a good
environment for rich app development, for many reasons. One "elephant in the
room" kind of issue is that JavaScript's object system is not acceptable to
most programmers, and most programmers require classical OOP.

Even prototype system fanatics probably would have to admit that the current
state of JavaScript doesn't work very well, with its warts like the "this"
keyword behavior, and the tendency for all framework authors to role their own
mutually incompatible systems.

Even Google seems to have backed off from this space recently - have you heard
much mention of Chrome OS lately?

~~~
loewenskind
This is my biggest gripe about HTML5. They had the chance to really fix a lot
of missteps but they made the (IMO) horrible mistake of using JavaScript as
their "assembly language". Regardless of what anyone thinks about JavaScript,
not _everyone_ is going to want to program with it. Many of us will be
programming in something else and compile to the base browser language.

What _should_ have happened is that they just define a (high level) VM that we
can all compile to. The browsers could have certain languages they compile to
this VM language their self (e.g. JavaScribt, VBScript, etc.) and the rest of
us compile to a binary file and point to that in our HTML page (e.g. <code
type="vm" location="code/main.hvm"/>)

~~~
nanairo
Oh dear... on paper great, but can you imagine how long it would have taken
them to come to a standard? I think HTML5 is already a bit on the side of
being a step too wide, but I guess we've been stuck in HTML4 (and related
technologies) for so long that it was necessary. XHTML 2 was an awesome
language, imho... just another case of too much meat on the fire, and so never
reaching a conclusion.

Let's get a good HTML5 system now, and then we can think of adding additional
scripting languages. The best is the enemy of the good. :)

~~~
loewenskind
>Oh dear... on paper great, but can you imagine how long it would have taken
them to come to a standard?

I don't think it would have to take too long. One browser could do it and then
the others could copy it. Further, the standard could be general until it's
worked out more.

------
powrtoch
For the record, the article's comments are full of people saying that their
experiences have been very different.

~~~
eli
Flash works fine on my android phone. At least as far as I know. I almost
never have a reason to use it.

~~~
catch23
I have flash on my N1 too (froyo), but it's definitely noticeable when the
webpage has flash on it -- even when it's a tiny flash ad somewhere. Scrolling
the webpage becomes really choppy -- sometimes I wish I could disable all
flash except for when it's used for video.

~~~
RK
Check the browser settings. Set "Enable plug-ins" to "On demand". It's
basically the same as Flashblock.

~~~
ergo98
The one annoyance of it is to enable a single flash element on a page, it
enables all flash elements on the page. Wish it was more granular.

~~~
andybak
Doesn't it work like 'click to flash' i.e. each element activates when clicked
on? I haven't tried but I assumed it did.

~~~
ergo98
It does, but at the page level. If a page has seven flash elements, once you
activate any of them it activates all of them (as the activation is of the
plug-in rather than the instance). I suspect this was by design, as the
thought would be "make compelling flash content and then we'll also get them
with the flash ads".

------
zsouthboy
This person's experience is completely the opposite of what I've seen on my
own N1, though to be honest I don't watch many flash videos on my phone.

Strongbad episodes and casual flash games run perfectly. The small amount of
video I have tried seems fine - Youtube via the inline flash player (not
launching the separate application) and flash player video porn.

The argument that Jobs was right because flash video sucks on a phone seems
silly - weren't we suspecting that flash _games_ were what Apple were trying
to keep off their ecosystem?

------
willheim
Seems to me that there are really two points to be made here:

1) Flash as it is currently implemented is for the desktop.

2) Flash for mobile (10.1) should really be called FlashMobile 1.0 and will
need a lot more time and development to give mobile users an optimal
experience. This will also require Flash developers to code for mobile.

With regards to 1) It is extremely powerful and can create
sites/services/applications/designs that cannot be viewed on a mobile device.
This aspect does not negate its value. And with regards to 2) that's no
different from many websites you visit in a mobile browser and they are not
optimized. Just try visiting HN on an iphone. Brutal! But load it up through
Google's mobilizer (<http://google.com/gwt/x=>) and it becomes actually
manageable.

So now, who is to blame? Adobe? Nah. They just need more time to advance the
mobile Flash code. The Developers? Nah. They just needed Adobe to come out
with a decent mobile flash platform and now will need more time to optimize
for it.

What is really to blame? Impatience. People see shiny "smart" phones and think
they should do absolutely everything right out of the box just like their 17"
laptop does. These things will come in time.

(ahem, that said, I've no issues with all the flash sites that work
beautifully on my netbook... that cost half what an iPad does).

------
51Cards
Have to strongly disagree here. Flash on my Nexus One works brilliantly. I use
it to watch videos and play games frequently and without issue. It hasn’t
crashed on me once. Flash is set to load on demand when I request it and
otherwise it stays out of my way. In my opinion it proves Jobs dead wrong.

Is Flash the FUTURE of the web? Of course not. But it is the here and now. And
by not having it available you will miss out on a lot of current content...
and will for awhile yet.

~~~
nanairo
Let's assume that you are just one case and not "the world". Sure, you could
say the same about the original article, and I would totally agree with you.

But here it's the bottom line: if it works fine with 50% of the people, that's
still not good for anyone who's not a geek (and maybe not for them either).
Even 80% is not good enough. 95% is more like it, but probably it would still
be too significant. I think you'd need something above 95% of cases to win
your argument.

What I am trying to say, is that finding one guy for whom Flash doesn't work
is a lot worse than how good it is to find one for whom it works.

------
mgcross
I ran the "Man in Blue" tests:
<http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/> on my N1 running
Flash 10.1 in the default (webkit-based, I assume) browser and was surprised
at how much faster Flash was than the HTML or canvas tests: HTML: 6.5 fps
Canvas: 13.2 fps SVG: blank page? Flash: 25.3 fps

For reference, my eeePC 901 only managed 34 fps in the Flash demo (Chrome 6,
Flash 10.1)

N1 running demo with 500 particles and shadows: Canvas: 2.7 fps Flash: 17.4
fps

------
tensafefrogs
"But much worse was that, even when these titles loaded, there was no way to
control most of the action. Most games required keyboard or mouse actions I
simply could not perform on my phone, even with its QWERTY slider. One shooter
wanted me to hit the CTRL key to fire; another asked for the left mouse
button."

Is this guy serious? He goes to play a game that was clearly built for a
computer and blames Flash because it's not playable on his phone that doesn't
have a keyboard?

~~~
nanairo
a) his phone has a keyboard... it just doesn't have a full keyboard with CTRL
key and everything;

b) _that_ is exactly his point. That most games, and most content was built on
Flash with the "PC" as the target system. Quote: "Flash was designed for PCs
using mice, not for touch screens using fingers." Hence even though Flash may
have been ported to mobile phones now, most of its apps won't, because the
developers were always thinking of Flash as running on a PC ('cause that's
what it did).

~~~
jacquesm
That's like saying that after the java run time has been ported to your mobile
phone that you can't run open office on it because it was designed for a
desktop. Of course it won't work, it never was meant to. But now that it is
available the authors of the software will start to receive feedback from
their users and will be able to fix those issues. It starts with platform
availability, up to that point you can't do much.

~~~
nanairo
Remember that the original supporters of Flash argued that you needed to have
Flash to support all those applications that are _already_ available. This
shows that actually they are not that available after all, they need to be
modified, and maybe heavily.

We are also not talking of small tweaks. If your program was created assuming
a mouse pointer and a keyboard, the whole interface is wrong for a
touchscreen. The amount of change to your code may very well be massive.

------
Estragon
Well, I don't know about the content of this article, but I'm glad it alerted
me to the availability of flash. I just installed it, and while it's not
ideal, it's adequate for practicing Chinese on skritter, which is exciting.

~~~
nwinter
We haven't optimized Skritter for Flash at all yet except to quickly scrunch
down the layout. We just got a phone to play with, so we'll see how much
better we can make it. I was blown away by the framerates one tester was
getting--this is a Flash app that's too much for some netbooks, and here it is
running fine on Android without any optimization.

The one thing that we'll have to figure out is how to improve the finger
tracking, if we even can--its default state is too slow to start recognizing
the strokes you're writing.

I can't speak to its video performance, but Flash 10.1 for mobile is even
better than I expected for rich apps.

------
contextfree
Do the videos need to be optimized for mobile because of API
incompatibilities, or just to make up for dearer machine resources (CPU, RAM,
network etc.) available on mobile? If the latter, wouldn't it presumably be
just as possible to make HTML apps that don't work on mobile for the same
reasons?

Ditto for the game control issue - if someone makes an game that's designed
for keyboard control (or a site dependent on "hover"), it won't work well on
mobile whether it's implemented in HTML, Flash, or whatever else, right?

~~~
cmelbye
Yes, that's the point. The author is saying that if you have to go through and
convert your existing Flash content to work on a mobile device, why not go the
full distance and convert it to HTML5?

~~~
contextfree
But that's begging the question - there's still no reason to do that unless
you already think Flash is a dead end, the future is HTML uber alles, etc.
Which this guy apparently didn't, since at beginning of his article he writes,
"I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told
Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more
than showmanship ... " until he tried 10.1 on Android.

~~~
cmelbye
No, this guy thought that 10.1 on Android would mean that desktop content
could be seamlessly consumed on a mobile device, thus invalidating most of
Steve's complaints. I don't think that he believed that Flash was "better"
than HTML5.

------
ck2
For a blog called "the geek's geek" it sure sounds like the guy needs some
technical support because many others report a completely better experience.

Also, it's a fracking mobile phone you are holding in the palm of your hand
and you want it to be as powerful as a desktop experience? Reality check!

~~~
tptacek
If native optimized HTML5 video plays smoothly and Flash doesn't, nobody cares
that it's not fair to compare the two. The "fracking mobile phone" point is
irrelevant. Either Flash plays smoothly or it dies.

~~~
daten
How many phones support HTML5 with all of the features Flash provides for a
direct comparison?

~~~
tptacek
No. Straw man. The point is, Flash video doesn't currently work on Android
unless you re-encode it. If you're going to re-encode video, you're going to
move to HTML5.

It's really this simple: Flash's bid for relevance on mobile phones is only
going to work if they can make desktop Flash video work reliably.

They don't even need to make the games and stuff work properly. Stipulate that
they fix that. They still fail if everyone shakes off the Flash video lockin.

~~~
nanairo
Exactly. It's the "No porting necessary" bit that would be appealing and would
let Flash swiftly be relevant on mobile. Little porting is fine too. But
anything non trivial, like changing the user interface, puts Flash on mobile
on much more equal footing with HTML5, which Flash should avoid.

------
zitterbewegung
Some of my experience with adobe 10.1 has been mixed. Some of the games on
Kongregate have been very usable and cnet tv played pretty smoothly. Going on
the daily show's website and watching movies showed a horrible frame rate.

------
vondur
I am hoping the HTML 5 will do away with much of the need for using flash.
Whether they use the VP8 or the MPEG codec, I don't care. They both seem to be
up to the task.

------
dusklight
Even if Jobs is right about the technical shortcomings of flash, that doesn't
change the fundamental fact. It should be YOUR choice whether you want to run
flash on your phone, not his. He has no obligation to provide help to get it
working, but neither should he be actively preventing even the possibility of
flash (or any other software) through legal and procedural means.

~~~
toddheasley
It is YOUR choice, which you can exercise by not buying an iOS device.

------
zacharypinter
I can see the argument against Flash in a mobile browser. I've tried it on my
N1, and have been less than impressed with how it handles zooming, panning,
focus, etc.

However, that doesn't mean that porting Flash apps to mobile apps is a bad
idea. Flex is still one of the best gui frameworks I've worked with, and I'd
love to use it for mobile development. Just not inside the browser.

------
hippich
easiest way to kill flash - to offer it, but it should be slow, buggy and
crash often. then everyone will think about flash as something bad and stop
using it. So Android platform actually tries to kill flash =) Not just talking
about is as jobs.

~~~
delackner
There is a large risk that people will decide that the terrible experience
they have with browsing (a flash-heavy site) on Android phones is because of
Android, and not because of Flash ads hanging their browser.

When you tell someone "flash just doesn't work on the iPhone, because flash is
crap" it may not be true. But most people seem to be perfectly content with
this experience, leading to a positive impression of the phone and industry-
leading satisfaction.

------
jvoorhis
`When I tried going to famous Flash game sites like Newgrounds or Addicting
Games, I found that, as Steve Jobs said, “Flash was designed for PCs using
mice, not for touch screens using fingers.”'

This is why we at Kongregate created our mobile-optimized site that features
only mobile friendly games. Of course, you can still browse the full site if
you like.

<http://m.kongregate.com/>

------
middlegeek
I have had more success than the author. It should be important to note that
Flash on a mobile device is not going to be as easy to use as it is on a PC
because the device is not as easy to use as a PC. I love having Flash on my
phone as it allows me to see Flash enhanced navigation, mapping sites and the
occasional game.

------
mattmaroon
"After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the
first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed,"

FWIW the Droid Incredible launched long before and had it. I've used it, and
it's not that bad for some stuff. It's better than no Flash player at all for
things like viewing restaurant sites.

------
joezydeco
Said it before and I'll say it again: the only reason people wanted full
desktop Flash on mobile devices was for the video. You can also s/video/porn
if you're so inclined.

It's pretty telling that the first thing this guy tried out of the box was a
bunch of video sites, not popcap or farmville.

------
elblanco
I wasn't aware that the sole reason for flash was to playback high-def video.

It's just a runtime. Make stuff that runs on the platform for that runtime.
JavaME will choke on most Desktop Java apps as well.

The moral of the story is, do mobile things on mobile devices and desktop
things on desktops.

~~~
bruceboughton
This would be true if the iPhone wasn't such an awesome video playback device.

------
gaiusparx
Just curious, if you are Flash app developer, are you considering moving to
HTML5? Is HTML5 and JavaScript mature enough for the job? Is there a
tool/utility that helps convert/migrate Flash codes to HTML5/JavaScript?

~~~
kreek
I'm a Flex/Flash dev and I've looked at HTML5 a couple of times recently. The
main product I work on is a web app similar to Adobe Illustrator for
customizing print products. You can draw vector shapes etc fine with HTML5 (or
SVG) but fonts is another matter because of legal issues. Yes there are some
open source fonts now but they are not of the same quality plus we'd have to
go back and change all our old designs to use the new fonts.

The big issue for me is development time. ActionScript is compiled, our app
has close to 50 classes and uses dependency injection. Right now I can't
imagine doing it with JS.

If you're looking for a tool to convert Flash to HTML 5
<http://smokescreen.us/> looks promising.

------
pcestrada
If the problem is one of performance, then each generation of mobile phone
should close the gap on reaching an acceptable level of performance for the
Flash player. Moore's law may be Adobe's friend in this case.

~~~
mikeklaas
Moore's law is nobody's friend in mobile applications where the limiting
factor is performance/watt.

------
dimka
flash is flash, and it allows some people to make awesome stuff. (samorost
mmm) I use it for business, and the technology earns me money. I am not alone.
it's curse that it got too popular, to a degree that there are lot of people
who hate it. I don't hate flash, I like it a lot. I hate situations when flash
is used for wrong reasons.

for me it fills like microsoft. still huge, but for me it's yesterdays
technology. if i think about a new project I do not want it to be based on
flash

------
paul9290
I have a simple flash app Ive been excited to test out. Anyone here have the
update on their Android? Could you help me out real quick? thnx

~~~
mgcross
Sure, N1 here, happy to test.

------
stretchwithme
i'm sure it'll be workin like a dream by version 15

------
c00p3r
"This content is not optimized for a mobile device", which means the entire
idea of using the flash based technology on a mobile device is deeply flawed.

------
Tichy
Flamebait

------
naturalized
I actually doubt that Adobe has the competence to make high quality software,
that would be required for mobile Flash (due to serious optimization that is
required). There is probably not enough engineering culture in the company for
that. I also think that a proper software company cannot be located in San
Francisco itself, otherwise they tend to attract programmers that are too
cool/have to many outside interests to write a high quality code.

~~~
myth_drannon
Many of Adobe's engineers are based in Ottawa,Canada and India.

