
Adobe announces Flash Player and AIR for Android - superduper
http://theflashblog.com/?p=1758
======
Frazzydee
They better not screw this up. Adobe has had a lot of bad press lately as
their exclusion from the iPad has unearthed lingering annoyances.

If this makes android devices sluggish or causes crashes, it will lend
credence to Apple's decision, and old complaints once again get rehashed.

~~~
dcurtis
I'm more interested to see if Android users are willing to deal with the
crashes and slowness for the convenience of having Flash.

Mac users deal with it because they have to, but Apple decided otherwise for
the iPhone.

~~~
bad_user
> _Mac users deal with it because they have to_

Actually it's their choice to have it installed or not.

~~~
durin42
Really? I don't recall ever having installed flash on any of my Macs in the
last couple of years. It was already there, crashyness and all. That's why
click2flash exists.

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whughes
Bizarrely, Flash Player has been available for Windows Mobile for years and
nobody has noticed. Windows Mobile also has a YouTube app and most of the
other major apps, but they're all terribly neglected and have virtually no
users. Microsoft had every advantage even before the iPhone came out and yet
they managed to squander them.

I predict a Zune phone/PDA which will add even more confusion to the brew of
brands Microsoft has managed to concoct. Windows Live Bing Connect Mobile CE
XP Pro .net System 8 2010 for Home Users, Enterprise Edition, anyone?

~~~
nailer
Sure, but the Flash on WinMo was not made available as a web plugin.

~~~
whughes
Yes, it was (how else do you use Flash, anyway?).

It worked in IE mobile and I believe there were tricks to get it to work in
other browsers (Opera). There was Flash Lite and a normal Flash plugin -- the
whole thing was pretty confusing, I admit.

There are also apps like Skyfire ( <http://www.skyfire.com/> ) hanging around
which claim various degrees of Flash support built-in. In any case, as far as
I'm aware all Flash support was and is via web browser.

~~~
nailer
> How else do you use Flash, anyway?

To play back standalone SWF files and WORA applications. See
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite>

But you're right, I just noticed there is indeed a web plugin:
<http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/> \- I stand corrected.
It's based on Flash 7, which I think explains why it didn't work for most
users (including myself, owning a WM 2005 and WM6 device).

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ashleyw
That video was hovering around 88% CPU usage whilst playing. It's hard to get
excited about a technology you know'll ultimately just burn your battery at a
dire rate in comparison to a native app.

~~~
dirtbox
I smell a rushed out product here so there's not a lot of hope for it having
been fully optimised in the way flash has been for Windows (the video was
using 8% CPU on my win7 system btw).

But at least they're actually fighting back with something other than cheap
digs and made up facts and figures this time.

Maybe they fired the PR department and hired better programmers.

~~~
mrj
Rushed out? They've been working on it for at least a year, probably much
longer. And they're not really introducing anything new, just a mobile port.

If anything they're taking way, way too long. It makes no sense to harp on
Apply when they haven't even been able to release on a willing platform yet.

~~~
dirtbox
Sure. Their entire drive recently has been to prove to Apple and the rest of
the world that they're worth keeping around. It wouldn't surprise me in the
least if this release has been pushed forward by a few months.

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jpcx01
Oh please... this better be _optional_. If they force this into Android's OS,
I'm gonna be pissed. I'm already happily living a flash free lifestyle

~~~
olefoo
Congratulations on being Adobe's worst nightmare. It's quite a trick for a
technology company to become so disliked that it develops anti-customers;
people who vow never to use their product and evangelize the benefits of not
using it.

On the other hand this phenomena usually comes with near complete dominance of
the market (vid. Microsoft), so psychotic MBA's might regard it as validation.

~~~
illumin8
It's quite logical given the situation:

Adobe essentially had a monopoly on browser-based plugins as it was included
natively in Internet Explorer and bundled with every copy of Windows XP.

In the years since 2001 when XP was released, they have enjoyed their monopoly
status by becoming the defacto standard for streaming video on the web, purely
because web developers made the pragmatic decision to go with the monopoly
provider, rather than requiring users to download and install a different
plugin.

That they've squandered their monopoly status is very visible, as their
features have been stagnant for almost a decade now.

It's a shame that finally, in 2010, they are adding GPU acceleration to their
plugin. They are finally caring about mobile power management by offloading
video processing to dedicated sub-components. They really are playing catch up
here.

Apple made the right decision to keep Flash off the iPhone. Until Adobe even
cares about GPU acceleration and using the h.264 decoding capabilities that
are built into most modern smart phones, it is not worth having on the device.

Of course everyone would love to have Flash video available on their smart
phones, but until Adobe can prove that they can deliver a reasonable 30 fps
and more than an hour or two of battery life, why should we put up with it?

------
grandalf
This is great news for Android and for linux in general. I installed the
latest flash beta for linux and it's noticeably better than the current
official release.

I'm guessing Google sees this as an opportunity to take market share from
Apple and will make sure Flash runs flawlessly on Android.

I think linux represents a huge opportunity for flash/Air and so it's nice to
see these improvements taking shape.

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jrockway
This reminds me of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

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timdorr
So, is anyone going to make ClickToFlash for Android?

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
At least the browser app is open source, so we can trivially fork it, disable
the flash plugin, and release the replacement browser to the Market.

~~~
technomancy
Ugh... hopefully it doesn't come to that, but I know if it does that it'll be
the first thing I do.

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jdietrich
I'm an Android loyalist and I really hope that this endeavour fails. Flash is
a rotten platform for a litany of reasons. I can only hope that Adobe are
beaten to the punch by one of the various open alternatives.

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dpcan
I'm a little lost. Is this a "coming soon" thing, or does it work in Android
2.0 now? Do people have to update their phones for it to work?

~~~
andyjenn
I've tried <http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer> from my Nexus One and it still
says, "Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is coming to Anroid 2.0 and future releases in
the first half of 2010", so I guess it's the former...

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ZeroGravitas
Amusingly, the Flash delivered video was totally wonky for me.

The lip-sync was off, the "loading" circle never disappeared and remained
overlaid throughout the entire video. I couldn't skip to points in the video
and it never indicated any progress, just remained on 0:00 of 0:00.

Everything but the lip-sync worked when I clicked the video and watched it on
the tv.adobe.com site.

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mtholking
Allowing developers to create apps once and deploy them as native apps across
all major mobile platforms would be a big win for Adobe.

But as a result, app stores will be overloaded when anyone with access to
Flash CS5 can deploy a native application.

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tszming
I think the good news is you have choices in Android, unlike in some platforms
they have no choice because their CEO hate it.

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MikeCapone
Somewhat OT: Have they released betas of 10.1 for OS X yet? Anyone here tried
it?

Have they finally narrowed the performance gap with windows?

~~~
ashleyw
<http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html>

I often run into Flash which just doesn't work correctly, though.

And it uses 10-20% less CPU compared to 10.0, so the gap's been narrowed, but
not nearly enough.

~~~
illumin8
Yeah, I've been using this for a few months now, since it is the first version
of Flash that can play Hulu in 1080p connected to an HDTV without dropping
half the frames. Now, it only drops one frame every few seconds, and crashes
about every hour or two.

This is with a 1GB Nvidia 9800GT graphics card - Flash plugin 10.1 is now
accelerating video playback using the ATI and Nvidia chips that support this.
However, they're doing a terrible job of it. Granted, this is a beta plugin,
but it still uses close to 100% of the CPU on a dual core machine (2.53 ghz
Core2, 4GB RAM, Win 7 64-bit) to playback 1080p video.

In XBMC on the same machine I can play back 1080p BluRay rips with 5.1 Dolby
Digital without dropping a single frame.

Adobe has a lot of catching up to do. This situation reminds me of Internet
Explorer 6 before Firefox started gaining market share.

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colbyolson
Interesting video, but why have a macbook sitting there in the interview, but
never being used?

A small jab at Apple?

~~~
radley
He uses the laptop to demo a live Connect Pro video meeting on his Andriod
device.

