AfterDawn: News

Adobe Flash for Android, WebOS delayed again

Last year, Adobe confidently proclaimed that it would bring a Flash Player for the smartphone operating systems Android and WebOS, saying they would have the launch ready for the Q2 of 2010.

Today, the company has said the player is not ready and will not be available until the "second half" of the year, putting a damper on the hopes of many Android and WebOS owners.



The player, Flash 10.1, will likely not be available until at least September says CEO Shantanu Narayen, adding that a BlackBerry version will also be made available at the same time.

The full player, which is available for Windows and Mac machines, will support all Flash video, as well as sites that use Flash for navigation or have Flash splash screens.

Adobe says the software will take advantage of the differing capabilities of the phone it is being run on, including multi-touch support and hardware acceleration.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 19 Apr 2010 0:27

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• 4 comments

• KillerBug

  Will someone please just write this already? I know that there isn't much inspiration to write it when Adobe claims they will make it anyway...but they promised it for 2.1, and they did not bring it. They then promised it for 2.2, and they will not have it ready. Someone want to write it so we don't have to wait for 3.45 to get flash?

  19.4.2010 03:36 #1

• oappi

  Flash would be crapware if so many websites didn't use it and i honestly can't understand why some people want to use it (and pay for it ).
  
  Most things done with flash just aren't that "cool" or worth the effort. Also plz correct me if i am wrong but isn't it so that there still isn't a stable release of 64 bit flash?... and 64 prosessors have being sold how long? i think amd introduced them to mainstream market 2003.. and they still haven´t got stable release of 64bit flash. While i think it wasn't appropiet for Jobs to say ppl at adobe are lazy, it is true.
  
  At the current rate 3.45 might be too optimistic.

  19.4.2010 19:10 #2

• KillerBug

  Yes, it is crapware, but a LOT of sites use it, and you don't really have anything resembling the "Full Web" without it. Also, it is a very low bandwidth method of delivering decent quality video and animation (if you set everything up right when you encode). This is a very good thing, as 3G isn't very fast, and you don't always have full signal. It might not do the job as well as some other methods, but it is very close. On top of that, by bringing flash to the device, you instantly double the number of Android compatable apps.
  
  As for the versions, yes it is still only a x86 program. It works fine with windows x64, and the only browser it does not work with is Internet Explorer x64 (and who needs a x64 browser? Do you want a browser that uses more than 4GB of ram?) BTW...a 64-bit linux version is in testing...just in case you want to run flash apps that take up more than 4GB of memory.

  19.4.2010 23:01 #3

• oappi

  yeah they have alpha-pre release (not stable) of 64 bit flash, but not stable.... and yes i think i have few times used more than 4gb of ram.
  
  Few times windows has complained that opera uses too mutch memmory and it has to be closed while memmory usage was around 70-80% (total being 8gb) and dropped near 40-45. I suspect flash is the main reason why most browsers are still 32bit only. It is not a big deal, but i for one would like all my software be native and not some old code that has to go though emulator like old dos games.
  
  
  Also there is html5.... unfortunately it doesn't have clear standard on the video it uses so for example youtube html5 uses h.264 (or something like that) which is only supported by crome and safari. opera and mozilla want to support opensource ogg and dont want to pay for h.264. Some people have found html5 to be less demanding on cpu than flash (with my setup it was too close to say).
  
  (if you want to try html5 in youtube go http://www.youtube.com/html5 player looks same but when loading video it says html5).
  
  Flash games are sometimes quite nice, but i could live without them, or at least go to windows pc (instead of mobile phone).
  
  So all that is left are (imho) those stupid pages done entierly with flash. It is true that you can't do those easily with out flash, but really most of them are just annoying and making ppl wait on loading screen and then force ppl to watch gay page shifting animation.
  
  
  edit: Imho it isn't acceptable that adobe has only come up with testing versio of 64 bit flash (linux only) when there has being mainstream 64 bit prosessors about 7 years. They are as lazy as microsoft was with ie until firefox showed up.

  20.4.2010 06:35 #4