# Adobe Drops Flash Support for Android **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 3, 2012, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138 "2012-07-03T21:00:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![JoelUpchurch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f05b48/32.png) [@JoelUpchurch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoelUpchurch)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2012, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/1 "2012-07-03T21:00:08Z")
[http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/personal-tech/mobile-apps/240002968?cid=nl\_byte\_2012-07-03\_html&elq=ae68276b4fa24620b8338674fcfa3a21](http://www.informationweek.com/byte/news/personal-tech/mobile-apps/240002968?cid=nl_byte_2012-07-03_html&elq=ae68276b4fa24620b8338674fcfa3a21)1 I’m puzzled on this one. Apple has already tossed Flash. Has Adobe decided the smartphone market isn’t worth it? ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2012, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/2 "2012-07-03T22:24:11Z")
That’s a shame, especially since the latest generation of 4g phones are finally fast enough to actually run Flash decently. ---
**Author:** ![Fuzzy\_Dunlop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/848f3c/32.png) [@Fuzzy\_Dunlop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuzzy_Dunlop)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 2:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/3 "2012-07-04T02:35:05Z")
> [@JoelUpchurch](#): > > I’m puzzled on this one. Apple has already tossed Flash. Has Adobe decided the smartphone market isn’t worth it? From the article you linked to: > [@](#): > > In essence, Adobe is claiming that Flash needs to tightly integrate with the hardware and operating system for optimal performance. The wide variety of Android devices prevents them from providing an acceptable version for all devices\*\*. A look at the Adobe Flash roadmap, shows that Adobe’s focus is going to be in developing Flash into a premium gaming platform that will be able to generate additional revenue through the activation of “Premium” features.\*\* > > **Attempting to turn the vast majority of poorly-performing Android phones into suitable gaming devices with Flash would be doomed to failure. It appears that Adobe is getting out of this potentially damaging market for a premium Flash version focused on performance and game play.** ---
**Author:** ![squeegee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/squeegee/32/14537_2.png) [@squeegee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/squeegee)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 2:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/4 "2012-07-04T02:51:08Z")
They were throwing away a zillion dollars optimizing flash for every rust-bucket phone GPU on the planet, for little revenue. Something had to give. ---
**Author:** ![aktep](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f0a364/32.png) [@aktep](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aktep)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 5:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/5 "2012-07-04T05:14:10Z")
Meh, I’ll be happy if they can get the stupid thing to play nicely with firefox again. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2012, 7:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/6 "2012-07-04T07:51:45Z")
> [@Fuzzy\_Dunlop](#): > > From the article you linked to: That just makes no sense. Adobe doesn’t make their actual content. How would having a premium model help Adobe make money? If Adobe is just changing their entire business model, then why use Flash at all? > [@squeegee](#): > > They were throwing away a zillion dollars optimizing flash for every rust-bucket phone GPU on the planet, for little revenue. Something had to give. And the answer would obviously be: Stop trying to optimize for everyone, and stick with the modern stuff. That said, this is all old news. I had held out that Adobe would realize that gaming is moving to more mobile platforms, but I guess they don’t get that either. Flash is going defunct soon. ---
**Author:** ![JoelUpchurch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f05b48/32.png) [@JoelUpchurch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoelUpchurch)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/7 "2012-07-05T03:14:38Z")
> [@squeegee](#): > > They were throwing away a zillion dollars optimizing flash for every rust-bucket phone GPU on the planet, for little revenue. Something had to give. So the first device they throw to the curb is the one with a quad-core processor? Wouldn’t it make more sense to drop the devices still running Android 2.0? ---
**Author:** ![Chimera](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/8e8cbc/32.png) [@Chimera](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chimera)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/8 "2012-07-05T03:24:49Z")
They’re no longer writing new versions of it, so they’re not optimizing it to work with new operating systems. Hence it makes sense that it doesn’t work on the new stuff but will continue working on the old stuff for a time. Apple may have gotten a lot of flack for dropping Flash a few years back, but pretty much everyone knew it was a buggy piece of crap whose time was limited. ---
**Author:** ![Princhester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3e96dc/32.png) [@Princhester](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Princhester)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 4:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/9 "2012-07-05T04:10:59Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > That just makes no sense. Adobe doesn’t make their actual content. How would having a premium model help Adobe make money? Perhaps by licensing flash to developers on terms that require the developer to kick back to Adobe when premium features are used. ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2012, 8:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/10 "2012-07-05T08:06:51Z")
Flash was an acquisition for Adobe (with Macromedia) and always sat uncomfortably with it’s other business units. Adobe’s primary business model is in selling content creation tools which take in a proprietary input (.psd, .ai, .premiere) and outputted an open format (.jpg, .avi, .html). This meant other companies could focus on making a better browser or movie player while Adobe purely focused on content creation. With Flash, it also inherited the execution platform and a not-very-good one at that. Flash had accumulated generations of cruft and spaghetti code, making Adobe responsible for a vast number of security holes and instability. Steve Jobs correctly recognized that Flash was an evolutionary dead end and that HTML5 would grow to replace it and signed the death knell of Flash with the iPhone. Adobe has also quietly recognized the death of Flash and now just needs to keep up appearances long enough for them to develop a compelling rich HTML5 content creation tool that can serve as the replacement. One sign of this is that they’re slowly moving most of the development team for Flash to India and China and essentially putting a freeze on features. I think Adobe will be as happy as anyone when Flash is dead so long as they control the next standard that arises. ---
**Author:** ![iamthewalrus\_3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/258eb7/32.png) [@iamthewalrus\_3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamthewalrus_3)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2012, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/11 "2012-07-06T23:14:55Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > And the answer would obviously be: Stop trying to optimize for everyone, and stick with the modern stuff. Apple sells a significant portion of the modern stuff, and they won’t let Adobe play. Basically, the iPhone and iPad are a big enough market segment that content producers are shunning flash so they can get iOs users on their sites, and also moving away from web apps toward native apps. The more that producers do that, the less need there is for flash. Adobe tried for a while to be a competitive advantage for Android, but they weren’t very successful. Flash is big and old and frankly pretty shitty code. It thrashes the cpu and makes the fans come on and kills the battery life of my laptop, even. They were simply not capable of getting it working well on phones in any reasonable timeframe. Even if they had been, a significant amount of legacy flash apps are designed with a mouse/keyboard in mind. There’s no way to “hover” for example, on a touch screen, but a lot of flash apps won’t even display their menus until the “hover” action takes over. At some point you have to move on and stop working on a dying technology. ---
**Author:** ![antonio107](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/7ea924/32.png) [@antonio107](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/antonio107)\ **Post date:** [July 7, 2012, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/adobe-drops-flash-support-for-android/627138/12 "2012-07-07T00:08:05Z")
ICS has the new Chrome HD browser, which has a “request desktop version” option for websites. Will _that_ somehow have a laggy full fledged Flash, or am I SOL?