Adobe Flash gets its full launch on Android

June 21, 2010 | Anthony Ha
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After months of back-and-forth debate about whether Adobe’s Flash technology is a good fit for smartphones, Adobe is launching a full version of Flash for mobile devices, starting with Google’s Android operating system.

Adobe released a test version of Flash to the public about a month ago, but this is the real launch of the finished product. Flash 10.1 should now be available for download on phones using the latest version of Android, 2.2, which is known as FroYo. And the company says it has shipped Flash to its other device partners, so that Flash should soon be available on BlackBerry, Palm webOS, Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo, and Symbian phones — basically, all the major smartphones except for Apple’s.

The desktop version of Flash 10.1 should also be available today.

Developers and designers use Flash to build a wide range of online content, but its biggest presence is in powering Web games and videos. Flash came under attack recently from Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, who blocked Flash from iPhones and iPads, calling it an outdated technology. Adobe has fired back, saying Flash works just fine on the iPhone and that Apple is playing “legal games,” but until Flash 10.1 it was really a battle of words, not products — the full version of Flash (as opposed to a stripped down version, called Flash Lite, that Adobe hardly mentions anymore) didn’t actually work on mobile phones.

I was given a review copy of a Nexus One to test out Flash, but I couldn’t get it to work properly before last month’s test release. It turned out I was given a review phone without Flash, so once everything was set up properly, things seemed to work smoothly. The mobile-optimized gaming and video sites that Adobe highlighted provided a better experience than random Flash websites, but even on sites that weren’t designed for smartphones, it was nice to no longer get error messages because Flash wasn’t supported. That seems to be the impression of analysts who tested Flash as well. (I didn’t keep the phone long enough to assess the effect on battery life.)

In its announcement, Adobe included a bunch of positive quotes from analysts, content partners, and device partners, but perhaps it’s best to end on a comment from Google — a company that is moving its video supersite YouTube from Flash to HTML5, and which has been more vocal in evangelizing for HTML5, but which has also sniped at Apple for its lack of Flash support. Here’s the statement from Andy Rubin, one of the inventors of Android and now vice president of engineering at Google:

We are excited that Android is the first mobile platform to support the full Flash Player. Now mobile users can browse the full web on their smartphones, and Android developers can use industry-leading tools to create immersive experiences on the web.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on media, advertising, and enterprise technology. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Can't wait to develop apps for this. The ones I've already made should run nice and speedy.
  • minardi
    What? "I didn’t keep the phone long enough to assess the effect on battery life." So you keep the phone for just an hour?
  • Jeff
    There are some things in this article that are just wrong. "And the company says it has shipped Flash to its other device partners, so that Flash should soon be available on BlackBerry, Palm webOS, Windows Phone 7, LiMo, MeeGo, and Symbian phones — basically, all the major smartphones except for Apple’s."

    There is currently no support for webOS and Palm has been complaining that Adobe has not been communicating with them at all about why they aren't releasing a version for webOS.
  • Leo
    No, you are wrong. Read the announcement yourself:
    http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201006/06222010FlashPlayerAvailability.html

    "Flash Player 10.1 was also released to mobile platform partners to be supported on devices based on Android, BlackBerry, webOS, future versions of Windows® Phone, LiMo, MeeGo and Symbian OS, and is expected to be made available via over-the-air downloads and to be pre-installed on smart phones, tablets and other devices in the coming months."
  • PacoBell
    Well, considering Jeff already mentioned the press quote you just repeated, there are three possibilities: Adobe is lying, Palm is lying, or Jeff is misinformed. I'm leaning toward the latter.
  • Charlie
    Translating "in the coming months" from Adobe standard time to when it will actually be available to the general public means most non-geeks not running FroYo on a N1 won't see it until 2011. Remember that Flash was originally supposed to ship in 2009. Adobe basically timed this worthless press release for when the iPhone 4 would start shipping.
  • Leo
    I know, it's quite a few words in that sentence I quoted, but maybe try reading it again and see if you get it.
    The Player has been released to their mobile platform partners, which means we should see updates in the near future. When that happens is no longer in Adobes hands.
    It's a bit odd to expect Adobe to be in control over the release schedule of both hardware manufacturers and OS developers.
  • Jordian77
    Steve Jobs is a control freak. He wants to have his paws in everything technology related and he wants to have complete creative and technical control. If that means cutting out viable software to cut out his competitors that's fine people will buy apple if it was purple and shocked you every time you had a call. He knows that his stuff will sell regardless of what he does.
    Yes, Flash provides some security risk. And yes, flash does eat up some battery power. But lately things are improving to the point where it doesn't really matter THAT much. The Ipad has already had this fair share of security risks without adobe products. Everyone's security of fallible, that's why it's silly to nitpick. But of course this is more of a power play than a legitimate technical argument.
  • Ted_T
    So let me get this straight -- Flash was officially released on an OS (Android 2.2) that has NOT been released. Meanwhile Flash has not been released for any currently released OS? Is there even an official release date for Froyo?

    Move along folks, there is nothing to see here.
  • Leo
    Ted_T:
    Exactly, it's an announcement of things to come, just like when Apple announced iOS 4 for iPhone 4 before it was actually available.
    There are people running FroYo on the nexus one and hence would like to get the release version of Flash Player 10.1, it's just not that the final version of FroYo is not released yet.

    And I don't know what planet you been living on, but the Flash Player is available for Windows, OSX, Linux and Solaris, all currently released OS'es.
  • samiup
    >"YouTube from Flash to HTML5..."

    no, Google has not said anything yet about an HTML5 youtube, thats mainly because they are not stupid enough to think that HTML5 is ready to replace everything that Flash does today and as we speak.

    there will most likely be a youtube in HTML5 and even a HULU written in HTML5, but that is not for any near future, and till then those who can run Flash on their mobiles will have a Full version of the Web and those who are banned from seeing any Flash content will have a crippled vision of the web.
  • Jason
    Ummm, yes they have. You can even use it already: http://www.youtube.com/html5
  • samiup
    nop, they didnt.

    "This is an opt-in EXPERIMENT for HTML5 support on YouTube. If you are using a supported browser, you can choose to use the HTML5 player instead of the Flash player for MOST videos. Your comments will help us IMPROVE and perfect the mixtures we're working on."
  • Jason
    LOL, are you an idiot?

    You: "Google has not said anything yet about an HTML5 youtube"

    My link shows that Google is working on an HTML5 youtube. Experimental or not, it exists.

    You also said: "there will most likely be a youtube in HTML5 and even a HULU written in HTML5, but that is not for any near future,"

    Well, my link support's your statement. I never said YouTube has been fully converted to HTML5. I was simply contradicting your 1st statement and supporting your 2nd.
  • Leo
    It's hardly "an HTML5 YouTube" becuse they have a opt-in HTML5 version.
    Is this a "Flash site" because they have some Flash content?
    I would say no, but I guess that is a matter of definition.

    Google have not made any indication that they will make HTML5 the default or even take the current HTML5 version further than an experiment.
  • Jason
    I guess I will say it again, I never said YouTube has been fully converted to HTML5 or that Google has said they plan on a full conversion. I simply disproved the absolute statement that "Google has not said anything" about an HTML5 YouTube.
  • Leo
    "a company that is moving its video supersite YouTube from Flash to HTML5"
    Have I missed some announcement from Google?
    So far they have a beta experiment with HTML5 video, but I have not heard anything indicating that they would move "from flash to HTML5".

    Currently the HTML5 beta uses double the CPU on windows and lacks captions, notes, overlay ads and proper full screen mode.
    What probably will happen is that they move from H.264 to VP8, but if anything that will mean that they rely even more on the Flash Player to deliver videos.Neither MS or Apple seems to want to include VP8 support in their browsers, and even if they would change their mind it would take many years before browsers that do support VP8 will be widespread enough to rely on them for delivery. With Flash it usually takes about a year until 90% has a new version, and YouTube could get almost all their users to upgrade in no time.

    So the idea of Google moving to HTML5 for video delivery seems pretty far fetched to me, so my guess would be that the author simply is misinformed.
  • Firefox, which has nearly 50% of the browser market, will be able to decode VP8 as will Opera (2.2%) and Chrome (14.5%)
  • Leo
    You are obviously going by W3C stats. It's a site for web developers, which are hardly representative of the average user.

    And those figures are for all versions of a browser. While IE users are the worst when it comes to updating, it still takes time for the latest version of a browser to spread. For example. about a third of Firefox users have an outdated version of the browser, despite 3.6 being released in Januari.

    The actual figure of users with a recent version of a browser that will add support to VP8 is probably more around 30%. But for arguments sake, say that VP8 would get a 65% reach with FF, Chrome and Opera within a year or so after they all released a version supporting the format. That is hardly an acceptable figure for any serious applications. Not being accessible for 45% of users is a disaster.
  • Don't know where you got that 45% from ;)

    Where do you get your browser stats from as you seem very confident about your data? Your source would probably help the community as a whole so please do share.

    Anyhow, I would argue that being accessible to 65% of users using standards compliant code is a big step in the right direction rather than take the pessimistic view that you seem to be taking
  • Leo
    Err...45% was a typo. I of course meant the 35% left over that does not have support assuming that your figure of 65% would be correct.

    I think most people in the community are aware of the typical figures, otherwise they are capable of finding out some figures that one can say is more representative than W3C.

    Some examples:
    http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2010&month=5
    http://gs.statcounter.com/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
    http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2

    Being accessible to 65% is useless, unless you are doing some non-commercial experiments with no concern for accessibility. Going with a solution with that kind of reach when you have technology that can do the same things and more with 98% reach would be insane.

    But don't let facts get in the way of your optimism though. Unless you are developing applications meant to be used by yourself only, I just hope your clients and/or users shares that optimism when your content is inaccessible to a large share of visitors.
  • HereAndNow
    None of the blogs (nor Adobe, as far as I've seen) seem to state the "minimum" requirements (CPU, memory, ...), to run Flash properly on a mobile device. If, for example, a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU is required, then only the high-end smartphones will be able to use it, excluding the existing & emerging low-med-range smartphones.
  • It would be beautiful if in a few months Apple came crawling back to Adobe to provide the Flash player for iDevices and Adobe replied with a simple NO!
  • DLG
    Yeah. Because its so beautiful when companies refuse to build their 'industry standard' tools on popular platforms. What a win for everyone! Adobe gets less customers, and Apple users get to keep having what they have already accepted (and bought into)

    Yeah Adobe would sure score on that one!
  • Guest
    I am no fan of Adobe, but Apple was clearly playing dirty in this one. They let Adobe invest millions in developing an application to convert Flash apps to iPhone apps only to ban its use immediately after Adobe released it.
  • I was clearly joking... DUH!
  • transporter2000
    I would be very interested in how Adobe plans on updating flash player for all the different mobile platforms in a timely manner, or if they'll just prefer to update for Android. After all, they couldn't even get photoshop on Mac OSX for years, to Apple's detriment.
  • BVT
    Well, if Apple would write backwords compatible OS's they wouldn't have left their users high and dry.

    There has never been an issue running old versions of photoshop on newer Windows OS's.
  • I've been using the leaked release of Froyo for a couple weeks now, and Flash has worked great so far. I don't watch hours on hours, but my battery hasn't taken a significant hit because of this.
  • Great news but still no official release of Froyo...
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