Adobe announces Flash Player and AIR for Android | Hacker News Reader

Adobe announces Flash Player and AIR for Android

theflashblog.com

60 pointssuperduper39 comments

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.

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.

> Mac users deal with it because they have to

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

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.

Flash comes preinstalled on OSX.

Of course, the root of the problem could just as much be Apple and not Adobe.

I noticed that while the Southpark app was displayed quite a bit, we didn't get to see almost any interaction with the Twitter app. Might be because it's unflattering, might not.

I'm sure we'll find out eventually. Given that Adobe has failed to produce a performant flash plugin for far more powerful devices (and won't even acknowledge that the plugin is buggy), I remain skeptical.

I was noticing that too, like how it was apparently stuck in horizontal format, and the massive stutter when it scrolled down to text input. The video example at the end was amusing to me too, as it appeared both applications simply froze part way in.

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?

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

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.

> 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).

"... Windows Mobile ... has been available ... for years and nobody has noticed."

Fixed? It's questionable at this point whether WinMo can maintain relevancy in the mobile devices market even over the next 1-2 years, let alone over the next 5-10.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the one hand, I have to salute them for diversifying their offerings and broadening the reach of the Flash platform. Like it or not, there is still a lot of Flash content that's actually worth having on mobile devices.

On the other hand, I can't help but think that Adobe is sacrificing depth for breadth, and spreading their resources thin across all the areas where they are trying to compete. Considering how poorly Flash runs on Linux and OSX, I'm nervous about this devolving into yet another "write once, debug everywhere" nightmare.

40% for me with Firefox on a 2 yr old bootcamped Mac book pro and XP.

      PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND            

     6566 zak       20   0  161m  35m  15m R   60  0.9   0:28.16 npviewer.bin

That does seem to be a bit much to simply uncompress and render a low-res video on a T9600 running 64-bit Linux.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

So, is anyone going to make ClickToFlash for Android?

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.

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

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

A small jab at Apple?

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com