I wonder, what was the catalyst that caused Adobe to admit what everyone else already knew? Perhaps they saw the 5 year anniversary of the iPhone on horizon and figured enough BS is enough.
I think it's pretty obvious. Adobe simply did the math and figured out that they are losing money on supporting the myriad of mobile devices that get thrown on the market promising 'the full web' with Flash. High development effort, low income, big competitive threat from upcoming HTML5 authoring tools.
Remember when Flash was still only available on Windows, Linux and OS X? Even then Adobe had a hard time properly supporting OS X and Linux, which have always been second-class citizens compared to the Flash Player for Windows. 6 months ago Flash Player for OS X didn't even have GPU accelerated video, and there wasn't even a 64-bit version for Linux. The only reason this has improved somewhat is because Adobe had to show the world that they were serious about supporting Flash, and to counter all the negative press Flash got as a result of iOS not supporting it, and OS X and Linux users complaining about it.
Now imagine the investment Adobe probably has to make to support 20 different ARM SoC's, and make the player even more efficient than it is on Windows PC's, knowing that neither iOS, nor WP7, nor Windows 8 Metro will ever support it. All just to sell a few more licenses for their Flash authoring tools, which is probably a dwindling business already.
Flash is dead because the world has moved on, and there is no money to be made from it anymore.
Flash is just a dying tech. Were someone to seamlessly roll its functionality into an easy to use package, I'm sure you'd see it die out for games as well, which is the only remaining use-case there isn't a ready replacement for.
At worst, they flat out lied to their developers and customers. At best, they are merely incompetent. Either way, if I were heavily invested in any Adobe technology I would seriously question how I could continue to trust that company.
However due to using the Adobe iOS tools(air etc.) The performance is dismal on iPad 2. iPad 1 owners have mostly sought refunds, and left bad reviews - forcing the developer to make the game "iPad 2 only" despite being a battery killing lap heater. (This already puts it in the apple cross-hairs as it's available to download to iPad 1 users.)
Discontinuing flash player is only half of Adobe's problem, the bad code is still being manufactured into processor-heavy apps which sap battery life and demand far-higher specs than what would normally be required if writing in native code, as noted in the example above.
The crux of the problem is that it's not a small amount of additional processing overhead, these basic apps are churning through battery via excessive cpu time.
These tools from Adobe are allow developers to port their flash games to the app store, and instead of increasing their revenue, it's creating problems and damaging their image/fan base.
"The memory limitations of iPad 1 (which are somewhere around 115 MB RAM per app) are just quite challenging. You have to have it running around 80-90 to keep it stable and the app has tons of timeline animations, the sources are 1 GB, all compiled into one single SWF file + some assets. The app was originally made for PC and upgraded for tablet devices. When you start creating tablet apps from scratch it's a whole different story. The game is now made with 'no compromises' compared to the desktop version and that keeps it unique."
The worst part being it is so even for trivial flash objects like those "copy to clipboard" clicky thingies (e.g github). It was not skyrocketing to 1.0 loads but enough to prevent the CPU to go in some deep C-state mode and/or back off frequency or whatever. Having such a NOOP Flash object was literally removing in order of hours from my battery life ("was", because ClickToFlash is brilliant).
I guess that way they will be true to their promise: the next iteration of Flash for Mobile will, in a way, be both stable and a non-battery sucker.
I gotta call BS on that. I've personally played hundreds if not thousands of flash games on an under-powered $500 laptop purchased in 2009. The article itself mentioned the success of flash on Blackberry devices, due largely to the fact that they cooperated with Adobe's engineers instead of freezing them out.
That's like the overstatement of the year...
And Adobe actually listened to jobs. I feel like Flash was an end in itself for Macromedia. It was, in part, Macromedia's great tilt at the "write once, run anywhere" windmill, and Adobe just carried that on (and I would say it's the public that loses out now that that's over). In the end, it doesn't matter to Adobe that the Flash runtime isn't in the iOS browser. Or in any browser from here on out.
Adobe sells tools to make shit. Jobs gave them a way to sell a new tool (Edge) and reminded them what they're actually in the business of doing.
That being said, I greatly appreciate everything the devs that worked on the Player have accomplished over the last few years (particularly Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason, and Matt Kaufman). Thanks for tilting at the windmill.
"The full web." Flash is still an important part of the full web. There's a lot of stuff that you will just never be able to do with the browser alone (capture video, do p2p networking, etc.) or that will be so difficult to implement amongst the many competing browsers that it's only economically feasible for giant companies to develop web applications. But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store. "Touch" Adobe's APIs for Touch work pretty well, but they require developers to update their applications. Not particularly hard (compared to porting a flash game to Obj-C anyway).
True: "reliability, security, and performance" Enough said. "Battery life." Software based rendering of graphics and decoding of video is obviously going to be way harder on battery life. Middleman lock-in Apple was burned in the past by this, but it doesn't seem like that much of a threat now.
Where can I download a full Flash plugin made by another company? Not the partial open-source implementations that only do a small part of everything that is 'Flash'. It's like saying Mac OS X isn't proprietary because it uses a lot of open-source pieces.
"(if Adobe had open sourced the player 5 years ago, we wouldn't even be having this conversation)"
But they didn't, that's the whole point.
Did you read 'the full web' part? Jobs says that most of the videos Adobe argues one won't be able to see are also available without the Flash container and other things like games just won't be available, but there are nice games in the app store to make up for it. He's admitting not 100% will be available, but it's not as bad as Adobe is making it sound. As someone who removed Flash from my desktop browser about a year ago, I agree.
"But Apple doesn't want web applications to be able to compete with the capabilities of native apps that they make a profit on in their app store."
Why do people keep repeating this? Do they think if they repeat it enough, it will actually be true? How much does apple make if the app is free? Why is iOS Safari consistently the most standards compliant mobile browser? What percentage of Apple's profit was contributed by the App Store? So allowing Flash would have killed the app store? No way because Flash performs so badly on mobile devices, which is why it isn't on iOS devices.
""Touch" Adobe's APIs for Touch work pretty well, but they require developers to update their applications."
Well, then that does nothing to help the 'full web' argument now, does it. That's great if the APIs work pretty well, but what about the thousands (millions?) of flash apps that probably won't be upgraded to those pretty nice APIs. Not much of a 'full web' experience then.
$99/year from iOS Developer Program. Even free native apps reinforce Apple's platform lock-in. Cross-platform web apps lessen users' dependence on iOS.
I don't actually hear that many people repeating this, but to expand a little bit on this, it's not just apps, it's also media content. The Flash ecosystem provides one of the few forms of DRM that the big movie studios have deemed acceptable. With Flash off of the iOS web platform it makes it just a little bit harder for users to buy content from someone other than Apple. Do you truly believe that there aren't motives beyond providing a better user experience behind what Jobs laid out in that article? The "break even" story about what the app store makes is a bunch of bullshit too. If Apple's operating expenses are truly 33% of every sale, then they are the least efficient company on the planet.
"Not much of a 'full web' experience then."
Compatibility is actually not all that bad. For your standard restaurant web site or photo portfolio, they're still usable even without being updated, the experience is simply not optimal. Still, having it at all is better than having nothing. The full web is about those millions upon millions of flash animations, restaurant web sites, e-brochures, photo galleries, and digital artworks, some of which date back to the late 90s now. A big part of why I'm disappointed by Adobe's decision is that that stuff is going to become inaccessible to a lot of people going forward. It's like the decision not to bring Hypercard over to OS X. Other technologies had already succeeded it, but there was a lot of useful and interesting stuff done in that format that is more or less lost now.
For streaming? Netflix uses Silverlight for their DRM on PC's, and uses their own homegrown DRM schemes for iOS and Android.
For mobile devices, companies like Crunchyroll, Hulu, Comcast and AT&T all have native apps for iOS and Android. Those don't use flash either, and perform easily as well as Flash.
So no, it's not the only solution that the studios find acceptable. Plenty of other solutions exist.
Yes. The Adobe Flash Player team, believe it or not, is easily over 100 engineers working on a variety of core and related projects (but not including the Flash Authoring, Flex Builder, and Adobe AIR teams). Of those, about 10-30 engineers are dedicated to Android depending on management edict of the week.
The entire Flash Runtime org (including QA, managers, and the AIR team) is over 400 people.