Adobe Flash for mobiles meets Its End

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Sanav3

Adept
So now the biggest selling point for Android is gone :)
It's been clear for a few years now that unless mobile Flash's performance and reliability improved, it was a goner; that day has now come, and soon, desktop Flash will soon follow.

In the eternal battle for Web supremacy, one of the major warriors just laid down its weapons. Adobe confirmed this morning that it will cease all development of mobile versions of Flash. That means that Android, BlackBerry OS, and other devices that had touted Flash capability as one of their key selling points will soon no longer matter.
The timing of this was interesting, because I had been conducting my own private experiment over the course of the past month with my MacBook. Some time ago, after much troubleshooting (including a complete rebuild), I realized that whenever I used Google Chrome, the MacBook ran unacceptably hot, and the promised seven-hour battery life shrunk to as little as three hours. It turned out that Google Chrome was kicking in the MacBook's discrete graphics chip, as well as putting more strain on the CPU overall.
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Source - Adobe Flash Meets Its End | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

Adobe's Flash Surrender Proves Steve Jobs And Apple Were Right All Along With HTML5 - Forbes
 
Steve was always right even flash used to crash my PC atleast once a day. Though main reason is chrome only but still not able to find light browser as chrome.

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Sanav3 said:
So now the biggest selling point for Android is gone :)
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Flash was never a "major" selling point for Android devices. Customization, powerful hardware, 720p AMOLED displays, displays for high-end devices, LTE, free apps is. Flash was always secondary.

Having said that, flash was one of Android's selling points, but I don't agree that it was a deciding factor for the customer.

Analysts: iPad and iPhone will fail because of a lack of Flash support

Happened: Flash failed because of a lack of iPhone and iPad support.

Sent from my LG Optimus One using Tapatalk.
 
^^Agreed on the customization part, but how on earth do hardware features (powerful hardware, display etc.) count as "major" selling points for a Operating System ?
 
^ that's because people are still attracted by the mHz myth. Also considering that android phones are soon to come with quad core and hd screens. It is already good enough to run desktop os provided x86 support is there. . . .
 
A desktop OS will slaughter a phones battery life, I don't see that possible unless a really good power efficient chip comes along or unless battery capacities increase.

Back on topic, I guess we'll have to say goodbye to this joke now -
iphone-vs-android-no-flash.jpeg
 
Well flash was never the selling point nor does any software. Most of the people are fascinated with the android and google hype.

Half of them cannot afford the uber price of iphone while the android has a wide spectrum of device ranging from 6k onwards. So it actualy doesn't matter for most of the people out there.

Infact more than half of them doesn't even know about flash availibilty and installation procedure.
 
True. Plus most mid range droids struggled to play flash content decently. Flash support was over hyped thanks to popular review websites like gsmarena where they accorded it as a "make or break" for android handsets. I guess google wanted to highlight what apple did not have rather then what android had. Tubemate works best in my opinion. ..:-D
 
XTechManiac said:
Analysts: iPad and iPhone will fail because of a lack of Flash support

Happened: Flash failed because of a lack of iPhone and iPad support.
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Hats of to you pal, nobody could have put it better.
 
Sanav3 said:
So now the biggest selling point for Android is gone :)
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LOL, Its an advantage and a differentiating factor for Android, not a sole selling point. Android does HTML5 considerably better than iOS both in terms of performance and compatibility and secondly Google is the company that is is at the forefront of aggressively implementing HTML5 features. So I don't think Apple is gaining any advantage out of it.

In fact if anything, I see the move as a new threat for Apple. Till this time, Apple has been bashing flash in the fear of what it can do to their App Store and had been pushing HTML5 as an alternative and an emerging standard. But in fact as I said, iOS HTML5 support is nothing great to write home about when it comes to the interactivity features. When reliance on HTML5 increases, most likely, either Apple has to step up their game as a result of this or alternatively they will try to downplay the HTML5 interactivity features like they are habituated to doing every time something does not go according to their plans.

In any case, HTML5 is not an alternative or a replacement for flash and yes, Adobe is not giving up on Flash, they are only giving up on Flash for Mobile platforms and only because Apple's has been very successful in its negative publicity of Flash.
 
^^ aren't android and iOS both have webkit browsers then how performance can be so different ?

EDIT: i feel flash was a major marketing thing for android, like the samsung tab ad just talks about the flash support. Also in many mobile ads they try to make 5k phone superior than iphone by giving that argument. at least this stupidity will stop.
 
Rahul said:
^^ aren't android and iOS have both webkit browsers then how performance can be so different ?

EDIT: i feel flash was a major marketing thing for android, like the samsung tab ad just talks about the flash support. Also in many mobile ads they try to make 5k phone superior than iphone by giving that argument. at least this stupidity will stop.
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Unlike Mozilla's Gecko, Webkit is not a directly reusable engine. Apple forked KHTML to develop the Webkit engine. While its open source, there are dependencies that do not fall under open licenses. So any one who takes up Webkit has to be really serious and has to do a lot of work to get it up and running. Also Webkit is only a layout engine. While its an important part, it does not make the browser on its own. For instance if you want to support embedded video tags, the Webkit engine's role is to decide where that video element is positioned in the page, You need a lot of other integration like with codecs to understand the video file and play it back. Same goes for other features as well. Further more many of these implementations are platform specific.

Apart from the UI code, Google added a lot of core code for the chromium project. They even developed and integrated their own JS engine (V8) to work with Webkit. In fact, if you get Chromium code, Webkit is a very small part of it. Like with other features, developers can also implement the HTML5 features independently. This is part of the reason why despite there being so many Webkit browsers, each browser is different in terms of capabilities. HTML5 support is no exception.
 
Goodbye Flash (for mobiles), R.I.P.

Welcome back, HTML5 ;)

Besides, i felt that Flash was a bit of a joke on the low end phones, with their inadequate CPU horsepower. But on high end phones, its a must.

Now, does this mean that all those websites which were going "Flash needed" will become "HTML5 needed" ;)
 
Pat said:
Gosh! Some people can really see no good in Apple! Everything Apple does, is bad-bad-bad :)
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Well, you cannot expect everyone to be naive enough to believe that everything that Apple does is good? As far as Flash is concerned, only a complete noob would dare believe all the crap that Jobs spewed about it.

Every software developed has its flaws and so does Flash, but Apple's software had a lot more more than Adobe's and I have no qualms saying that after having worked at at a company that had been developing software for Apple since the Apple II era and has been the prime rival of Adobe for nearly as much time and having used software from both companies. I also have a very personal experience of how Steve Jobs/Apple tries to use companies that brought them to their current position and brand value as their door mats and I have extreme satisfaction and pride in stopping them dead on their toes in one such mud slinging attempt.
 
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