Aral Balkan

Adobe's current mobile strategy is very similar today to what it always was: get the Flash Player on as many handsets as possible. Let's qualify that statement, however, with some all-important details, starting with differentiating the two types of Flash support that Adobe wants to implement on devices:

• In-browser Flash support (plugin)
• Standalone Flash application support

In-browser Flash support is good*

Getting in-browser Flash support on devices is a logical and understandable goal and Adobe is right to devote as much effort as possible into making that happen. In-browser Flash support on mobile devices means that your mobile phone can render today's web (which, like it or not, contains heaps of Flash content) faithfully and thus provide a similar experience to what is possible on the desktop.

* That said, given that Flash content is notorious for its high CPU (and thus power) usage, and given that a lot of Flash content on the web today is undesirable from the perspective of the end user (ads, intros, etc.), it would make sense for such in-browser implementations of Flash to voluntarily default to a Flash Block behavior (i.e., have Flash disabled by default with the option to activate Flash content if and when the user wants to.)

The remainder of this post will deal with Adobe's attempts to get Standalone Flash application support in mobile devices.

Flash Lite: stillborn

Adobe's initial mobile strategy, dating back to 2005, revolved around getting a cut-down version of the Flash player called Flash Lite on as many handsets as possible.

According to Adobe the number of Flash Lite devices shipped should have reached 1 billion in 2009. While that seems like a huge number, it's rather irrelevant. For one thing, there is more than one version of Flash Lite so that 1 billion number includes outdated players. Also, that number hides further segmentation in that it includes both devices that support only in-browser Flash content as well as those that support standalone Flash applications. Finally, and most importantly, Adobe failed at making it possible for developers to monetize Flash content and failed to provide compelling reasons for developers to create Flash content for Flash Lite.

Why did Flash Lite fail? Because it went for a lowest-common-denominator approach, trying to support as many devices as possible, instead of focussing on creating a great user experience on one device and expanding from there. In other words, it failed because the focus was on features (in this case: wide-range of device support) instead of user experience.

Open Screen Project: same old, same old

You would think that Adobe would learn from its failure with Flash Lite that getting your technology on a huge number of devices isn't worth the effort if no one wants to use it. Unfortunately, their strategy hasn't changed with the introduction of the Open Screen Project.

The Open Screen Project aims to remove the fragmentation created by Flash Lite and ultimately aims to have a single Flash Player (the latest one) run on every device on the planet (cue: hysterical world-domination laughter). It seems that Adobe has learned nothing from the recent failures plaguing another company with a similar strategy for its operating system: Microsoft.

Where Microsoft struggles to provide at least a mediocre user experience across the countless hardware combinations that it must support, Apple runs circles around it: Having limited itself to a handful of hardware configurations – all, furthermore, within its control – Apple can provide its users with an exemplary user experience. Apple can do this because it wisely chose to control both the hardware and the software, limit segmentation, and focus on the user experience instead of expanding effort in a fruitless quest to run on any given hardware configuration on the planet.

Adobe's Open Screen Project is a Microsoft-style, Age of Features strategy that aims to get Flash running on every mobile handset on the planet, user experience be damned. The question is: who cares if you can run the same crappy experience on every handset?

Flawed to the core

Adobe's Open Screen Project and its mobile efforts will fail for one simple reason: they are not competitive when it comes to user experience. A Flash application running on a device will never have the same performance or the range of hardware support as a native application. It will never be able to compete with a native app in terms of user experience. Whereas Adobe's plugin strategy worked on the web, it has and will continue fail on mobile devices.

(See this post for a more detailed discussion of Write Once, Run Anywhere and how it differs from Write Once, Compile Anywhere.)

So what should Adobe be doing instead?

In its scuffles with Apple to get Flash on the iPhone, Adobe has already stumbled onto the strategy that it should be following for mobile devices: focus on tooling and Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation to native applications.

In the upcoming CS5 Suite, you will be able to use Flash CS5 to create native iPhone applications. In other words, Flash developers will be able to reuse their existing skills to build native applications for the iPhone. Native applications that will be optimized for the iPhone and, hopefully, indistinguishable in terms of device-specific support and performance from native applications compiled using Apple's own tools.

This should have been an a-ha moment for Adobe. And I did hope that it would usher in a new era of focus on Adobe's core business (tooling). Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be case, if this short Twitter conversation with Ted is any indication:

I respect Ted greatly but what he (and Adobe) are missing here is that FPS (the frame rate an application can achieve) is just one tiny variable that affects the user experience of applications on mobile devices. How well are native features like location, multi-touch, local storage, etc., supported? A virtual machine is always going to be a couple of steps behind native applications in terms of device-specific support. It's a losing game. The focus is wrong.

The majority of Adobe's revenue comes from sales of its Creative Suite products. As such, it should be keeping its eye on the ball and adding value to the CS products as much as it can by making them the premiere toolset for creating mobile content. Getting Flash application support on handsets is not a requirement for this. Instead, Adobe should drop the huge amount of time, effort, and money that it is currently expanding on this and instead focus on enabling Flash developers to make native applications for the top mobile handsets.

Adobe's next move should be to support native application creation on Android phones like the HTC Hero and Motorola Droid and maybe even adding support to Dreamweaver for building native Palm WebOS applications.

Comments

• "Adobe's Open Screen Project is a Microsoft-style, Age of Features strategy that aims to get Flash running on every mobile handset on the planet, user experience be damned. The question is: who cares if you can run the same crappy experience on every handset?" Aral, I think this is questionable on a few levels: nowhere in Open Screen Project does it say it aims for Flash to be THE glue that binds all the device experiences together, it's just one part. In fact, the site's mission mentions "taking advantage of Adobe Flash Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR." Judging by OSP site updates, the project seems to have stalled, but that's a different story. Nonetheless, I think Adobe is in a rather good spot - Adobe is one of the top 3 companies ready for the even bigger mobile explosion that is happening now: Adobe, Apple, Google. And they are ALL are using "Microsoft" practices which is really nothing more than Capitalism. Seriously, is Apple and their walled garden any less 'Microsoft-ish" than Microsoft? Google is ditching Gears in favor of Chromium,html5/CSS3 which AIR supports - so I think the next mobile web will rely much more on html5/css3/javaScript driven apps than anything "Native". Are you not sick to have to d/l apps for what amounts to a good web experience: app by app?? This sucks if you ask me. I don't want a cnbc app, kayak app, avitap app, twitter app...I would much prefer these just be web based apps - but they cannot for now. And they will not work with true robustness on a mobile browser for at least the next year or two (perhaps the iPad might change this) -- but I think Adobe is planning proactively by working with the OSP making sure their next Flash players provide the right balance of memory management, hardware acceleration, cpu etc.. for set-top box to android phone and many things in between. For the first time, I see how truly ahead of its time AIR really is; especially thinking how many mobile frameworks it could work on - and i don't exclude 'in-browser' just because it's packaged as a separate app (now) - mobile browsing is evolving so fast we are clueless what's next. Google is building their own DNS service, they own loads of 'dark fiber', they could buy Sprint at the drop of a hat.... the game can change quickly and disruptively, literally overnight is my point. I now see why there are so many web standards based non app-store apps for multiple platforms springing up. I think Adobe is right there, whether native or non-native wins out. In other words - don't be so sure your very last paragraph is not their next move already. If you include Enterprise development - then this question you raised answers itself "The question is: who cares if you can run the same crappy experience on every handset?" The answer is any company paying millions for BT, big national Ad buys, Augmented Reality services. So sadly, corporations care very little about UX/UI and more about plain data, $, and ROI -- but it is this money stream that lets us guys tinker with better UX. Omniture might prove to be Adobe's ace in the hole which is an entirely different discussion but also favors them now. Thanks for the thought provoking post. MK

  by Michael Kaufman on 2009-12-27 18:20:21

• "Focus on tooling and Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation to native applications" is the approach choosen by OpenPlug in its Elips Studio 3 product : create your mobile application using Adobe Flex Builder 3 and generate native package for iPhone, Windows Mobile or Symbian (Android will come shortly).

  by Fabrice Lemenorel on 2010-01-12 10:48:04

• Aral -- so you're essentially saying that Adobe should give up trying to get Flash onto devices and focus on building apps that help designers and developers write native apps for the various mobile platforms. Correct? Frankly, if you're that convinced that Flash simply isn't suitable for the mobile space, then you're right, you're going to get very frustrated at Adobe for not giving up and going home. :) Mobile is a very challenging space and it's constantly changing. There's a lot of ways one could adapt to that pace of change, and each has its own set of tradeoffs. We choose to focus on the Flash Player rather than native support for any given subset of devices or mobile OSes for a lot of reasons, too many to list here really. One really big reason, though, is that we're not fighting an uphill battle to get Flash into mobile. Device manufacturers (with the obvious exception of Apple) want Flash on their phones and have been working with Adobe to help get it there - both so that their users can get the full Internet on their phones, and so that developers and designers can create mobile-specific Flash applications. Everyone wants great user experiences, Aral. Even Adobe :) We just disagree on how to get there.

  by Rachel Luxemburg on 2009-12-29 05:22:45

• Also just to clarify " awesome as they [Adobe] are, sometimes it does seem that they rest on their laurels too long, and try to branch out far to much."... Adobe employee's work diligently, and are cleverly skilled professionals. I'm speaking of the company's direction, the one's making top-level decisions, and calling the plays. Adobe needs to close doors, and focus the team on being so freaking innovative & overly prepared on early releases that the community is both enthralled & inspired by the tools & opportunities. Microsoft did it with the PC. Macromedia did it with the browser plugin. Apple did it with the iPhone. Adobe needs to keep an intuitive eye to the future, 5 years from now, and stay far enough ahead. If desktop application development was a priority, AIR 2 should've been released at the time AIR 1.0 was, or perhaps not done at all. Slider, iPhone/Android/Windows Mobile app-exports should've been worked on instead. Or Open Screen should've been realized even earlier. The decision-makers at Adobe need to look deeper into the crystal ball, and plan accordingly so that they knock balls way over the fence earlier in the game. Otherwise, they're doing a pretty damn good job as it is, and I love 'em for it anyhow = )

  by leef on 2009-12-31 23:05:11

• [...] it is if you believe what Aral Balkan had to say recently. His post sparked some intense and much welcomed debate within the community [...]

  by Adobe’s Mobile Strategy Fundamentally Flawed? on 2010-01-02 10:36:50

• [...] post is a partial response to Aral Balkan’s post, so you may want to have a quick skim over them. They’re quite interesting. I’ll wait [...]

  by Further ruminations on Adobe, Flash and mobile devices. « Noise and Heat on 2010-01-04 18:18:51

• I don't take your first assertion for granted though. Is it in fact desirable (for the user that is, not Adobe's shareprice ;-) ) for anyone to aspire to "provide a similar experience to what is possible on the desktop" ? Is that the aim or ambition of the mobile medium? I hope not. These are users with different contexts, requirements, and expectations. (If an untouched desktop site provides a good experience on a mobile, it is only by chance.) Practically, and even if the technology makes it possible, do users on the move want to wade through the treacle of Flash splash screens? - which, let's face it, is perhaps its most common usage on the real world web. Ha! If Adobe really cared about users' experience on, and the growth of, the mobile web, they would create a runtime which detects - and never renders - splash animations on small screens.

  by James Pearce on 2009-12-26 16:48:53

• Great post, Aral -- and something I've been thinking about a lot as I've been developing iPhone, Android, Flash and Ajax-enabled applications lately. Adobe has created a fantastic set of content development tools that are increasingly lying unused on my system -- not because I dislike the tools, but because their output has become more cumbersome in a multi-platform world. In fact, I've caught myself using Flash solely as a prototyping tool lately -- to flesh out a new product before using more cumbersome tools to port it to the platform of my choice. At this point, even if the Flash player were to come to the iPhone or Droid, I doubt I'd release a SWF-based version of an app in favor of a native app. I want users to use my software, and frankly, as much I rely on Adobe products myself, I don't expect my customers to have to. Over the years, Flash has beaten Java at its own game -- the ability to compile code that will run on any platform, assuming it has the runtime code necessary; the problem is, I don't feel the need to play that particular game anymore. Give me native, or give me Web.

  by VeryVito on 2009-12-26 17:28:06

• The browser will continue to be the preferred method with which users will experience the Internet. This applies to mobile and large screen TVs as well. Apple's incredible success with the app store is a necessary but temporary solution. Look at the Big Picture... Users are moving in droves to The Cloud on their desktops because they want their applications to be TRULY PORTABLE. And by truly portable, I mean they want to use the app on their phone, their friend's phone, their TV, their desktop, a random kiosk in a restaurant or bar - anywhere, anytime. You cannot accomplish this by downloading a native app. You accomplish this by being accessible by any browser. Native apps have some advantages. But these advantages don't come close to comparing with ultimate portability. That's where the Flash plugin in the browser comes in. That's where Flash-Everywhere comes in. Maybe most of the Flash apps you're making are unnecessary intros. But there's an entire ecosystem of developers (I'm one) who are creating the next generation of everyday apps that will live in the browser, and be accessible anywhere anytime.

  by Joel Fiser on 2009-12-26 22:17:23

• I posted my thoughts.

  by Scott Janousek on 2009-12-27 01:35:38

• The user experience does not lies in which Flash player we have in the device. It's the shopping experience, for what we need to expand the functionality and feature of the devices, we need is a trusted website to purchase/download our mobile applications. iPhone make it successful because of Facebook social networking has already proven. Everyone play games on a single platform. It doesn't take a genius to think about it but I find Adobe lack of marketing focus on mobile market because consumer doesn't know which phones supported Flash 10.1 and which phone work best for them. To win the market, Google has a part to do so, getting manufacturer to provide a standard specification include display screen. If Adobe cannot do that, it will fail the marketing utterly.

  by James L. on 2009-12-27 03:02:16

• I think this review is a little ridiculous. People said the same stuff about Java and .NET when it came to runtimes and JIT. Most people today don't have a clue they are running an app written in java. I see native app compiling as a stop gap and it feeds the proprietary machine that is Apple. There are so many developers in the world that I don't see why we shouldn't be demanding more out of these quickly advancing hand held computers such that they support more runtimes / VMs. I get why they don't, but I don't think that is an excuse to start pimping their approach/model! Back in the day I knew some hard core programmers who would snicker at anyone not writing machine code since it was going to run faster than any other form of code. NOBODY writes machine code anymore! I have had my iphone now for a couple years and all I can say is... I am ready for the google phone. Why? Because Adobe is putting out a model that via AIR I can monetize my flash applications on those devices. Independant reviews are already calling iPhone the #3 behind BlackBerry and Google Android in the coming years (note: both those platforms are participating in Open Screen and will likely support monetized flash app installs.) Aral... I think you are under-estimating Adobes history of innovation and drinking too much of the Apple Kool-aide (and I run all Mac OSX as well, but I don't feel the need to be a fanboy and sing their praises.) Besides... Objective C completely sucks!

  by steve on 2009-12-27 07:00:06

• I am excited about the Open Screen initiative and I don't believe that it is aimed at a mobile-only moving target as you have suggested. A screen is a screen. Airport advertising hardware, television sets, an exterior screen on a mobile device or the main screen itself, the UI for an alarm system or remote control, an in-car dashboard instrument panel, etc. These things can and should be tuned specifically to the hardware, which is the point of the whole thing really. Which means speed is one of the core goals of Open Screen, at least in how I interpret things. Now, in regards to Flash -> iPhone, it could be cute. But I plan on keeping my XCode around for many years to come.

  by Eric Dolecki on 2009-12-27 13:10:53

• [...] abierto en nuestro grupo de Linkedin una discusión a raiz de los post de Aral Balkan y de Scott Janousek, ya que nos parece que los temas que salen a la luz en ellas, son realmente [...]

  by La estrategia de Adobe para móviles y dispositivos | BlocketPc :: Flash Lite y Mobile Web on 2009-12-28 08:07:31

• [...] are just a few weeks removed from an Adobe/developer cage match, where Adobe’s mobile strategy was bashed and Flash Lite, in particular, was called all sorts of nasty names. No matter what you feel about [...]

  by Why were there exciting Flash Lite devices at 2010 CES? : Chuck Freedman on 2010-01-12 20:49:17

• James: I agree, the goal of mobile should not be to recreate the desktop experience but to surpass it based on all of the wonderful new abilities that mobile platforms give us and which you mention in your comment. I was specifically referring to the faithful rendering of web content (in this case Flash content) on a mobile device. Something that I believe you too will agree is important (with the caveat that nobody wants Flash intros or animated Flash ads rendered on mobile screens.) Hi Joel, I believe the Flash community is aware that the types of apps I'm creating are not unnecessary Flash intros: no need for unnecessary personal attacks to make your point. I do agree with you that the web is a very important part of mobile but not the closed web (e.g., Flash) that you propose. Instead, it's the open web (HTML, CSS, JS) that are the exciting technologies for web. Flash fits neither here nor there. It offers neither the advantages of open technologies nor those of native yet proprietary solutions. As such, it's caught in a very undesirable no man's land as far as mobile is concerned. Steve: I believe the reason most people don't know they're running Java apps is because most people aren't running Java apps. When talking about UX nightmares, Java is the bogeyman. Swing, anyone? Also: objective-c is a beautiful language given the constraints in which it was created (C compatibility). Of course, it pales in comparison to the simplicity and dynamic nature of languages like Python and JavaScript. Scott, thanks for your post, looking forward to reading it after I post this comment.

  by Aral on 2009-12-28 11:24:13

• The idea that, "...A Flash application running on a device will never have the same performance or the range of hardware support as a native application. It will never be able to compete with a native app in terms of user experience." is, in practice, simply wrong. The Mac runs some Windows apps better than Windows and the Windows user experience has been basically the same for 10 years! And, I understand that with Alchemy a C++ version of Doom runs as fast or faster than it does "natively". The reason that Apple has done so well is because they had such a pathetic target to compare against. We all know that technical capabilities often don't translate into innovative apps that solve practical problems. Maybe it took the iPhone to show developers the, "art of the possible" but by no means does that validate the entire Apple story nor suggest Adobe should pack up its "world domination" goals and go home.

  by Mark on 2009-12-28 15:02:46

• Aral - OK - you predict Flash will be left behind in the coming wave of Mobile / TV / Internet Everywhere. I say - Flash usage is about to explode and maybe even dominate Mobile / TV / Internet Everywhere. No subtleties there. We'll see where we are at the end of next year.

  by Joel Fiser on 2009-12-28 18:49:05

• Hi Aral. The 140 character limit on Twitter is a bit constraining so I thought following up here might be better. I am sincerely sorry that you feel frustrated that Adobe is not listening to you. But I have to say, if your definition of "Adobe is listening to me" is "Adobe immediately starts implementing everything I suggest" then you're setting a very high bar, both for us and for you. Are you going to be at MWC in February? We're going to have a number of people attending and if you'll drop me an email to the address I left I'll do my best to connect you with some of the team for a face to face discussion.

  by Rachel Luxemburg on 2009-12-28 21:09:31

• Hi Rachel, Thanks for your note. Of course, I don't expect Adobe (or any other multi-billion-dollar company to spin en-point at the bequest of a blog post :) That said, on the mobile front, many of us have been talking – nay, yelling at – Adobe for quite a few years now. If I had a penny for the number of times I've had the "ship has sailed" conversation with regard to Flash and mobile with different developers over the years. The ship appears to keep sailing. I feel that the problem is a fundamental/strategic one. Times are changing and yet Adobe's single-minded pursuit of getting the Flash player on a gazillion devices hasn't changed. It's as if the machine is driven, Terminator-like, on this goal without evaluating the alternatives in light of a changing environment. It's my opinion that the current course is futile and a waste of effort that could be used to far greater good elsewhere. Adobe should concentrate on its core business: the tools, instead of persisting in an unattainable pipe dream. I hope you guys at least debate this internally. Unfortunately, I don't currently have plans to attend MWC. I'd love to see Flash continue to succeed (and by Flash I mean the tools and technologies of the Flash Platform, which I no longer see as necessarily bound to the success of the Flash Player; at least on mobile platforms.) Not least because of my own investment through the years in those tools and technologies. But I'm also aware that the times they are a chagin'.

  by Aral on 2009-12-28 22:00:36

• [...] was reading the post from Aral and a response from Scott on Mobile Strategy from Adobe. These posts sparked an interesting debate [...]

  by Flash Mobile or Not Flash Mobile ? | biskero on 2009-12-29 14:02:23

• Hey Rachel, I just responded to your comment in this post (it was getting too long for the comments section).

  by Aral on 2009-12-29 16:12:21

• Well, since Adobe has already announced that Dreamweaver CS5 will support creating BlackBerry widgets, I wouldn't be surprised if support of PalmOS or other mobile platforms is also coming in Dreamweaver CS5. One of the main focus of CS5 seems to be mobile, so I think it's a bit too early to criticize Adobe on what they should be doing with Dreamweaver CS5, when they might actually be doing what you are suggesting they do. Also seems to be that getting Flash onto many mobile devices is just Adobe's first step and that the second step is getting Adobe AIR on all the devices that belong to the Open Screen Project. While not as good as compiling to native applications, I think many developers and companies will use Flash or AIR to reach the wide range of devices, without having to port the applications to various different languages. Now Flash or AIR applications won't ever be as fast as native applications, but for many applications the extra speed isn't needed. There's also already public APIs for Flash Player 10.1 which includes multi-touch support, geo-location support, accelerometer support and more. While Flash and then AIR will likely be behind in the newest APIs available for mobile devices, many applications won't need these. So I while I don't expect the cutting edge, fast 3D mobile applications or games done in AIR or Flash, I still think the platform will meet the use case for a number of projects and reduce time to get applications to multiple mobile devices. Also AIR 2.0 supports creating native applications that embed the AIR framework into the application, so perhaps depending on the success of Flash to iPhone in Flash CS5, Adobe may support creating native mobile applications down the road.

  by Matthew Fabb on 2009-12-29 18:35:19

• I'd like to see the Flash Platform developed to include a Flash-OS, that's intended purpose is to be a stripped down system easily installable on custom devices. Crazy, right? I know, but that's exciting, bringing Flash outside of desktop's & cell-phones. I love AS3, I dig the community that's been cobbled together, and while our rep was tarnished earily on by ad's, intro's, flaky install/upgrade steps, and CPU cookie-monster behaviors, we are consistent cross-platform (mouse-wheel support on mac coming very soon!), we outperform the javascript engine, we have web features that shock & awe many user's simply by their existence (computeSpectrum in the browser blows the admin-office away), and thanks to Adobe's monetary incentive the platform pushes a lot of things through quicker than the world of non-profit open-source standardization does. I'm glad Aral goes hard against Adobe from time to time, because as awesome as they are, sometime it does seem that they rest on their laurels too long, and try to branch out far to much. How many photo editors does Adobe have now? 3...4?

  by leef on 2009-12-30 18:46:11

• Perhaps more about the actual topic discussed: The Open Screen project appeals to me if this means that a) an impressive % of hardware devices (TV's, e-reader's, mobile phones, desktops, camera's, anything with a decent processor) will either have Flash Player installed, or easily be installed with a packager similar to the .air installation process bundled with apps. b) There will be some consistent standardized system to determine levels of functionality per host device. Such as desktop is a level I environment, Mobile level II, TV level III, and what functionality you can expect based on that. c) The player has a clear & simple detection service to notify your app what level the host device performs at, and is automatically handled at runtime to run at Level X. 10.1 will have a global error handler, so that we'll be able to handle unknown error notifications better, and either contact our server and/or give the user a custom popup error. Yay d) The development IDE should have a clear & simple process for developing your app to respond to the different levels of compatibility provided by the host device, and shouldn't require completely separate development tools, or source files. Good simulation testing will also be a must. Flash-Lite was a decent idea to me, but it failed to elicit my interest because I vaguely remember it being a separate purchase, and requiring significant development time rather than being something easily exported from the web app. I think it's a big project for Adobe to make developing apps for multiple host-devices a clean & manageable experience, such that the IDE can parse out functionality and at least attempt to export a single .swf that can respond to the various host it is running on. I expect early releases of the authoring apps which intend to fulfill on the Open Screen Project to be clunky & not to provide effective workflows. And also to experience font issues on the mac, but I am excited about the open screen project for sure = )

  by leef on 2009-12-30 19:31:53

• [...] December 31, 2009 Posted by jeffvroom in 1. trackback In reference to Aral’s article, Why Adobe’s mobile strategy is fundamentally flawed, I’ll have to back Adobe on the basic question at least. They have the right strategy just [...]

  by Flash on Mobile – is Adobe on the right track? « Jeff Vroom’s Blog on 2009-12-31 05:31:19

• Point of order: Flash Lite has been (and is still) tremendously successful in particular markets. If you ever visit Japan I could spend a week doing nothing but taking you to visit small content companies who do 100% Flash Lite content. They're doing very well. FL has its flaws, but the fact that it never worked in the US and Europe is not fundamentally a technology issue - it's more due to how long it took those markets to adopt mobile devices capable of doing anything interesting.

  by andy on 2010-01-05 00:44:27

• Hey Apple Fan Boy with the Macbook Pro in your header image. I don't see how anyone can take this article as a serious, unbiased article with valid points. "Where Microsoft struggles to provide at least a mediocre user experience across the countless hardware combinations that it must support, Apple runs circles around it: Having limited itself to a handful of hardware configurations – all, furthermore, within its control – Apple can provide its users with an exemplary user experience. Apple can do this because it wisely chose to control both the hardware and the software, limit segmentation, and focus on the user experience instead of expanding effort in a fruitless quest to run on any given hardware configuration on the planet. " Are you serious Apple Fan Boy? That strategy nearly drove Apple to the grave until Microsoft bailed them out. Then, Apple started selling MP3 players in order to survive. Even today, Mac OSX only runs on 5% of the world's computers. FIVE PERCENT!!! In 2010!!! Google it. Leave it to Apple and its Fan Boys to make such a laughable article! Good day gents.

  by CKMBA on 2010-03-12 14:35:49

• >The majority of Adobe's revenue comes from sales of its Creative Suite products. ... Getting Flash application support on handsets is not a requirement for this ... Adobe's next move should be to support native application creation on Android phones like the HTC Hero and Motorola Droid and maybe even adding support to Dreamweaver for building native Palm WebOS applications. Sorry, Aral, but I fail to see the logic there. What good is it to produce mobile content that isn't supported on the mobile devices? Sounds like a recipe for disaster. My recommendation for Adobe ... forget trying to develop standalone dev platforms entirely, focus on optimising your plug-ins (making them more efficient and prevent CPU inefficiencies). Then support 3rd party solutions like OpenPlug to do it for them - Adobe is too strapped as it is - they need to leverage those relationships. Besides, if they can develope plug-ins that run efficiently, adequate stand-alone type operation should be available using regular swf's be running a local server on each device, with it's own database. Flash being a client-server archetecture by nature lends itself, imho, perhaps even better than typical standalone app architecture, if they worked out the logistics right - it's just that they never have. I see no reason, in fact, why ANY web app, be it Flash, HTML, PHP, CF, etc,couldn't be standalone if browsers were designed properly. Browsers are too stupid. And if you ask me, I'd say that's where the future lies - where standalone and web apps are one and the same because they'll all be based on client-server architecture where the browser handles everything intelligently with it's own local server. CPU speeds are finally getting to where that can be done - we just need to re-arrange our thinking about how browsers should work now.

  by davea0511 on 2010-04-12 09:03:22

• The idea that, “…A Flash application running on a device will never have the same performance or the range of hardware support as a native application. It will never be able to compete with a native app in terms of user experience.” is, in practice, simply wrong. The Mac runs some Windows apps better than Windows and the Windows user experience has been basically the same for 10 years! And, I understand that with Alchemy a C++ version of Doom runs as fast or faster than it does “natively”. The reason that Apple has done so well is because they had such a pathetic target to compare against. We all know that technical capabilities often don’t translate into innovative apps that solve practical problems. Maybe it took the iPhone to show developers the, “art of the possible” but by no means does that validate the entire Apple story nor suggest Adobe should pack up its “world domination” goals and go home

  by Trailers for Sale on 2010-05-13 20:53:14

• The VGK Platform provide native graphics GPU and Video hardware acceleration, and each iOS, Android, PMP version is tuned to take advantage of the OS and device hardware. Flash is an awesome media format, and it can run exceptionally well on portable devices. ChrisBrady@animatedmedia.ca

  by Chris Brady on 2011-03-24 20:02:55

• An open flash system where the source is licensed to device OEM would be ideal. Adobe can refactor the Flash code base to run on a hardware abstraction layer that's implemented by the OEMs. The onus of running performant code is on the OEMs. A virtual machine wouldn't be as fast and will turn into a Java experience, write once, suck everywhere.

  by Bob Goldman on 2011-09-28 03:20:59