Flash Player exits Android

I continue to be amazed at the effort Adobe is going to to make their own platform irrelevant. They claim to want to focus on "premium copy-protected video" but do they really think that only targeting that to desktop systems when mobile adoption is skyrocketing is a good move?

Here's the thing.<p>It initially seemed like a good thing for Android to support Flash but as time as gone on it's become apparent that the end result is a lot of sites produced a premium iOS experience and sub-par Flash based one for Android. Whether this flawed experience was due to limitations in the platform or lack of effort on behalf of the service I wouldn't like to say but it happened either way.<p>Hopefully now with Flash unequivocally end-of-life'd (on mobile at the very least) we might see Android devices being served the same experience as iOS devices.

The BBC could solve its android problems in a microsecond if it wanted to - just have it play the same unencrypted stream that they give to iDevices.

This is a huge issue for me that I recently faced when I bought a google nexus. Flash cannot be found in the jellybean market, and the only way to get flash working is to install it through apk and use a developemental firefox build. Even at that, the quality is blurry.<p>I know flash is dying but unfortunately a number of sites (mostly video sites) which I frequent regularly have not made a full (if any) conversion meaning there is a whole sector of the internet that is not accessible from my tablet.<p>As I bought it as a media consuming device, I expected less of a harsh cut from Adobe and Google.

Honestly, I don't think I would have even noticed my tablet didn't have Flash. I don't have Flash on my Linux laptop (I use Chromium there) and haven't missed it --its nothing ideological: if I ever need Flash I'll install it right away. On the Windows netbooks we do have Flash but only because there we use Chrome instead of Chromium and it comes with Flash. I don't think I actually use it for anything other than playing video games with my son, which is not very often (his favorite games now are puzzle apps he plays on an iPod Touch, not that he plays those that much either).<p>(Off topic: now that I mentioned it all, it felt like we have a lot of hardware, but then I realized altogether I payed less than the cost of a high end laptop for it.)

Flash still works on my HP TouchPad, but it's not that good. Video almost always lags the audio which makes them awful to watch and Video playback is the <i>only</i> think that matters with flash anymore and it fails at that so, I really see no purpose for it. I wish all the sites would just adopt native video.

Flash is always going to have a place on the desktop, but as a developer having to make a choice between Flash &#38; HTML5 or just HTML5 is going to be pretty simple for a big chunk of purposes.<p>Lets hope Adobe focus on HTML5 tools.

Android users get screwed over with the iPlayer app. Not everyone wants to install Flash (and now no one can even if they want to), yet for some reason they feel need to serve the video in a different way to the perfectly fine iOS stream.

Adobe took the pragmatic approach. The HTML standard is maturing to the point where Flash will become redundant technology sooner rather than later for regular media consumption. Pulling the cord on Flash Mobile is the right thing to do. Seriously, which relevant company still builds anything for mobile on Flash?

well nice going google, first effectively kill or setback html5 video by torpedoing everyone with their anti h264 campaign and then get f*ed up the bum by them.<p>(here's a guy who 2 years ago said that flash is effectively dead long live html5 video)<p>pps. i won't really miss flash. but i do miss the time where every site had h264 vids up