Well, this was about as inevitable as Apple not losing a super-secret iPhone prototype: Google and Adobe have pretty much formed an alliance against the iPhone, in true the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend style. The agreement between the two companies is clearly a big middle finger towards Apple and the iPhone. Update: Apple has finally added a framework to Mac OS X that will enable accelerated Flash video content – something Adobe has been asking for. This should enable Adobe to greatly improve Flash video performance on Mac OS X. Anyone know about Linux?
Andy Rubin, Google’s vice president of engineering, announced the agreement, or deal, or whatever you’d call it, on Adobe’s company blog. The gist is that Google is working together with Adobe to bring both AIR and Flash to the Android platform.
“Partnerships have been at the very heart of Android, the first truly open and comprehensive mobile platform, since we first introduced it with the Open Handset Alliance,” Rubin writes, “Through close relationships with carriers, device manufacturers, developers, and others, Google is working to enable an open ecosystem for the mobile world by creating a standard, open mobile software platform. Today we’re excited that, working with Adobe, we will be able to bring both AIR and Flash to Android.”
Rubin then goes on to more or less attack Apple head-on. “Google believes that developers should have their choice of tools and technologies to create applications,” he writes, “By supporting Adobe AIR on Android we hope that millions of creative designers and developers will be able to express themselves more freely when they create applications for Android devices. More broadly, AIR will foster rapid and continuous innovation across the mobile ecosystem.”
Yes, the struggle between Apple and Google is heating up even further, and unlikely partnerships can be made there. Google already delivers Flash through Chrome (optionally), and now, they’re working with Adobe to bring Flash and AIR towards Android. While I personally have no interest in Flash, it’s a good thing that Android is open like this – users are not forced to install and/or use Flash or AIR applications, but can do so if they so desire.
“Google is happy to be partnering with Adobe to bring the full web, great applications, and developer choice to the Android platform,” Rubin adds, “Our engineering teams have been working closely to bring both AIR and Flash Player to Google’s mobile operating system and devices. The Android platform is enjoying great adoption, and we expect our work with Adobe will help that growth continue.”
Whether or not this will sway developers to work on Android remains to be seen. It will all depend on how pervasive both AIR and Flash will be on other platforms; if they come to webOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, then people making games would have to go through a lot of extra effort to support the iPhone. With Android rising quickly in popularity, Apple might find out it shot itself in the foot.
Speculation, of course. For now, the iPhone is the most popular mobile platform for application developers, and that surely won’t change overnight.
Sometimes I don’t understand Google, one day it leverage standars and the other it partners with a propietary pluggin company. You can’t serve two masters Google.
Edited 2010-04-22 22:49 UTC
Of course you can.
It’s called choice. Google is more like the BSD license than the GPL.
Not exactly, but that comparison is accurate for the moment. Let’s not forget that Google can change any time if they feel they aren’t making enough cash.
Btw, Thom… bad idea. You know what happens when you bring up GPL vs BSD even when the comparison is spot on. Oh well, guess I should go buy some popcorn.
By supporting Adobe Google implicitly weakens the argument for HTML5 video, HTM5 games etc. While Flash is prominent few – if any – companies will create dual standard solution because it’s too costly.
Moreover, Adobe essentially remains in the innovation drivers seat because without Adobe’s support for specific innovations developers cannot deploy them.
Adobe is trying to lock you into their platform. Apple is trying to lock you into theirs. Google, rather than championing an open platform is simply supporting whomever helps them gain leverage against the competition.
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How so? 100% support Flash, HTML5 and if Microsoft provided a multiplatform plugin – Silverlight, then leave it up to the developers out there to decide the best tool for the job. It isn’t up to Google or Adobe or Microsoft or Steve Jobs to dictate what technologies are and aren’t used; it is left up to those in the driving seat making the decisions as to the suitable technology to use for that given project. For Google anything that makes using the internet smoother, more reliable, less frustrating, is a customer on the internet for longer and thus using their searching engine more. At the end of the day it is all about the bottom line, the more people are online the more they’ll use Google’s search in turn they make more money.
Also, here is an article that outlines the issue (which I noted on my blog) regarding Flash and Safari:
http://www.herkulano.com/2010/02/core-animation/
The issue isn’t wholy in Adobe’s court; when you take into consideration that part of the responsibility for Flash’s performance woes are due to Apple’s design for Safari, I hardly see it fitting blaming just one party. Adobe has finally made Flash 10.1 100% Cocoa and using Core Animation – the benefits of which only show when using the latest and greatest webkit – it is up to Apple to get these things included into Safari they ship.
On the whole—and history will hold me out here—developers choose the cheapest tool for the job, not the best.
Why do you think Flash is so common when clearly it’s not the best tool for information conveyance? It’s cheaper than paying a real developer who knows what they’re doing.
Well actually CS5 now allows one to export a Flash project to HTML5; the problem is that a person who can programme doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make a sexy website; just as Microsoft provides the ability to separate the code from the front end to allow each specialised group to work on their part of the application, so you will need some sort of division that allow the creative types who have the ideas being able to turn it into a reality. So far Flash has provided such a platform but now Adobe has now provided the ability to export out of Flash to HTML/Javascript/etc.
graphic design != information design
Flash is not exactly the cheapest tool on the market. So you point is?
Further, developers do tend towards the better tools, only to have their management force them towards cheaper tools or even preferred tools that are not cheap. Developers often have little to no say in the matter.
No it is the fact that there are no content creation tools out there for HTML5 + javascript + webgl that decides the matter…
It just isn’t an integrated solution that the majority of people can adopt at the moment once it becomes integrated it will be very hard to stop.
Masters? They serve only one master: their bottom line.
nO, bUT pROFIT
They are probably just using adobe as a stepping stone; they own most of the content that matters already (youtube) and could easily make their own open framework later, as has already been discussed here.
But why the stepping stone? It is a way to quickly improve their standing w.r.t. Apple’s mobile division.
Google just work like a SAINT to help “users” get what they want, and Google can make profit during this process.
We will see how far Google can go down the road…
Here is one of the replies from the SAINT to its customers.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/22/google-no-longer-investigating-f…
Edited 2010-04-22 23:07 UTC
This is a very good point. Certain people demonise Apple for adopting “patented” technologies rather than “free and open” alternatives yet their choices have consistently been to promote STANDARDS, like HTML, CSS, MP4, AAC and XML, and open industry formats such as ICS and MBOX for situations where there is no gazetted standard.
Flash is NOT a standard, neither is Theora. It’s not about the technology being open or patented, it’s about what has been adopted as a standard, and trying to promote standards while looking after the best interests of the business and it’s investors.
Look at it this way, if I was manufacturing nuts and bolts in a country that uses metric STANDARDS and I decided to manufacture using imperial measurements because a few mechanics were complaining that they already had a heap of tools for imperial sizes, I wouldn’t be promoting the standard that had been set, and it wouldn’t be a good long term business model. Standards are standards, and they remain unchanged (for the most part) until there is a new standard, then the industry moves on and re-tools to that.
Flash (and Theora) are not standards and are therefore not constants – they can be changed on a whim and there’s nothing Apple nor Google could do about it. Google have decided to take that chance, Apple aren’t prepared to. Demonise them all you like but them’s the facts.
In order for anything to become a standard, it first has to be named as a standard. Before that point, there is no standard.
The W3C proposed Theora as the standard video codec for the web. That is becasue, at the time*, Theora was the ONLY viable codec that meets the requirement … the requirement being that it must be royalty free, and able to be implemented by any party at all.
H.264 is a standard, but it is a standard for applications such as digital TV transmissions and Blueray players. It is NOT the standard for the video codec for the web, because it fails to meet the most important requirement of web standards … h.264 is not royalty free.
That fact alone puts a huge hole in your argument.
The next point is that the format for Theora is stable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora
It has been stable since June 2004, six years now. Any Theora video encoded after that point can be played by a current Theora player.
That fact widens the hole in your argument to a gaping chasm.
OK then, finally, if the W3C proposals for HTML5 had been accepted, as they may well have been were it not for Apple’s objection, then Theora WOULD be a standard, thereby completely destroying your point.
*PS: If the rumour that Google are going to open the VP8 codec actually eventuates, then VP8 could easily then become a more suitable video codec than Theora is now. Notwithstanding that speculation, as of this moment, Theora remains the ONLY suitable codec to become the standard codec for use on the web.
Edited 2010-04-23 02:39 UTC
Nonsense. Apple not only doesn’t support Vorbis and Theora, they also don’t let anyone else support Vorbis and Theora on their platform, forcing people to use proprietary standards (like AAC and MP4) if they want to make content available for Apple customers.
Support for proprietary standards is one thing, actively obstructing support for other standards is something entirely different.
Well that’s just BS
Perian is quite popular, and adds support for
File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
Subtitle support for SSA/ASS and SRT
to quicktime AND apple even promotes them on their own website.
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/perian.html
I’m thinking of iPhone, not OS X, but last time I checked iTunes support for Ogg files left a lot to be desired and was impossible to support properly (but that’s several years ago and might have changed).
I don’t get what Adobe always blathered about, being unable to accelerate Flash video on OS X before. Silverlight did it, for crying out loud, and they did it with their *first* Mac version. Far be it from me to promote a proprietary technology like Silverlight, but there’s no denying it runs circles around Flash in the performance department.
I have no idea why Adobe doesn’t implement video acceleration on Linux. I’m pretty sure that they’re just lazy.
They could at least use X-Video, but AFAIK, they don’t. If the want, they could use VDPAU or VA-API to get full decode acceleration on NVIDIA hardware and in the future, Intel and AMD hardware. IIRC, even Gnash uses VDPAU. There is really no reason why Adobe should be having any trouble with audio or video on Linux. They just like to complain because it gives them an excuse to be lazy.
I think you can’t overlay anything onto xvideo (i.e. buttons and other flash crap). Flash was never designed to play videos well.
They don’t because Linux is not important to them. That’s why proprietary web technologies are evil (but supporting them, in this case, is good for business – Google’s business).
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And it’s not important to them because Linux’s market share is 1%. And that 1% is scattered across 100 distros which use different kernels, different libs, different apis,different versions of the same lib.
Paying developers to support Linux better isn’t commercially justified. But if the likes of Red Hat and Canonical will sign some NDA with Adobe, I’m sure Adobe will be more than happy to let them improve flash for Linux.
Their Linux flash developer (singular) has written several excuses for this on the official flash-for-linux blog:
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/
Basically, instead of targeting the correct way of doing things, meaning VAAPI for video acceleration and let the drivers (VDPAU, XvBA, CrystalHD, etc) catch up with their VAAPI-support, they target specific Linux distribution releases (also legacy ones) and proprietary lowlevel APIs so they get lost in the API jungle and fail to release anything ever.
The caselog for Flash 10.1 to be included in Solaris shows that it uses VPDAU for video acceleration. Of course you have to be using Nvidia graphics card, there is also mention that it supports VAAPI, of course Solaris doesn’t currently ship with VAAPI libs (there’s a RFE).
http://arc.opensolaris.org/caselog/PSARC/2010/131/mail
That’s kind of what I meant. Short-term it’s great for NVidia users that they support VDPAU but long-term VDPAU is a dead-end. If they/he concentrated on VAAPI and made it a requirement for accelerated video playback I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t take long for proper VAAPI libs to appear for OpenSolaris and any remaining bugs would be taken care of.
Normally I’m not at all against extra features and backwards compatibility, but in this case it’s a proprietary project (which means no community patches) with only a single developer allocated so every hour of his time is extremely valuable.
Don’t forget incompetent.
I have found the recent alliance between Google and Adobe very funny. Google utilizes flash extensively in youtube, but otherwise they have been pushing html5. I can’t see Google reversing this overall trend. They want Flash to work as well as it can now, but the future is htlm5. Google is obviously only doing this to stick one to Apple. If Adobe thinks they have found a long term friend they are mistaken.
I think Google has the same perspective as most reasonable people: Sure Flash sucks, but its not our business telling people what apps they can or cannot run on their devices. Let the superior technology win, no need to restrict users freedom.
You’re contradicting yourself. On one hand “Flash sucks”, but OTOH the “superior technology wins”.
Current success of Flash and past success of software like Windows 95 clearly shows that a software’s success is in no way a result of technological superiority.
Back in the 1990s OS/2 was — at least on the technological level — way more advanced than Win95.
Corporate decisions decided the outcome.
First, in the 1980s IBM (inventor of the PC and long time market share leader) allied with Microsoft to put MS DOS on PCs, later Windows, and then to cooperate on OS/2 development.
When MS already achieved an almost universal vendor lock-in to Windows, MS showed IBM the middle finger because MS didn’t want to share any OS profit with IBM and concentrated on Windows.
Those corporate tactics along with some marketing lead to today’s Windows market penetration of roughly 90% and not technological superiority.
Back to Flash:
Flash was successful before Adobe bought Macromedia, but it wasn’t omnipresent. Adobe even supported SVG.
The current omnipresence of Flash is the result of merging the technology into Adobe’s Creative Suite. Adobe used CS’s market share to get Flash to content creators “for free” — in a similar way as Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer for free with Windows.
From my experience the worst part of Flash’s performance on OSX and Linux is not video playback, but vector drawing. Adobe could’ve used OpenGL to speed this up years ago but didn’t. Now Adobe is blaming everyone besides themselves on Flash’s crappy performance. Using OpenGL on OSX for vector drawing has absolutely nothing to do whether Apple offers a video via GPU decoding SDK or not.
Edited 2010-04-23 11:49 UTC
It’s more like HTML 5 is the FUTURE and we’re living in the PRESENT.
Yes over 3-4 years, when hopefully over 90% of the internauts have a full standards compliant HTML 5 browser (that the standard isn’t completely done is another thing), we can talk about a removal of flash.
iPhone/iPad market share === death of Flash
Brightcove already modified its highly popular streaming service to support HTML5 video and not only Flash.
I don’t know if Brightcove’s customers like the New York Times have already rolled out the new version, but that’s not a matter of some distant future, but should happen any moment if it didn’t already happen.
Google likes Flash for a couple reasons that often go unmentioned.
1. Ads. Flash is better for displaying ads on top of video files and providing feedback.
2. Content protection. Movie companies don’t like how HTML 5 video files can be saved locally with a simple right click.
3. IE support. Flash is the easiest way to support IE. IE9 has HTML5 but it is Vista/7 only and more importantly there are office users that will be stuck on older versions of IE for years to come. There is the plug-in option but that would only work if Google stopped supporting Flash.
If Google wanted to replace Flash in the future then they would have designed Chrome OS around HTML 5. By bundling Flash they are making it clear that they will support Flash for another decade. Hulu is also sticking with Flash and those two video providers are enough to keep Flash around even if the rest of the web dumps it.
But this isn’t all bad news since Adobe is being pressured by competing technologies which will push them to improve Flash on all platforms.
People are morons… thats why half a million people pre-ordered the iPad before they knew what it was or could do. Its the reason I own Apple stock.
These same morons would switch to Android if it ran Flash and could harvest their stupid virtual crops on Facebook’s Farm Town.
There was a line for the ipad at our local mac store and a reporter asked a lady in line why she was buying one.
Her response: I don’t know, but maybe I’ll find a use for it.
So we have people waiting in line for devices for which they have no intended use.
Watching Mac hipsters in line is like going to the zoo. In a nearby shopping village there’s a really nice spot where you can sit and eat lunch while watching the Mac hipsters stand in line. My favorite hipster is the 35 year old in hip huggers and a belly shirt. A fascinating creature to behold while enjoying a sandwich.
Since you failed to disclose the gender, I’m not sure how disturbed I should be feeling right now…
Be very disturbed.
The local hipster males wear tighter pants than the females. The females generally don’t think it is cool to show off their assets unless they are doing it in a nerdy or ironic way. I guess I’m so used to living around hipsters that I forget that people in other areas talk about hip huggers in relation to good looking females.
Another funny thing about Mac hipster lines is that they tend to turn it up a notch since it is a big event for them. It’s really quite entertaining. I once walked halfway past an iphone line and just burst into laughter. All these hipsters taking themselves so seriously while standing in line for a phone.
And unfortunately people wonder why there was a financial crisis in the United States – one only need to look no further than the case scenario you gave of someone purchasing something without the foggiest clue as to what it should be used for. Stupid people buying stupid shit they don’t need (to quote George Carlin).
<sarcasm>Flash on top of Java… it’ll be lightning fast.</sarcasm>
Android runs slow enough on my MyTouch 3G. Its clunky and slow as hell.
Old hardware. Droid/Nexus One level and better are the future, and they run Android plenty fast.
Also, google and adobe can certainly provide a native flash run time. Flash has already been ported to Unix.
How is all this news? We probably know for half a year now that Adobe brings the Flash Player and AIR to Android. Betas have been shown for months, just look on YouTube. And it all happens in the Open Screen Project where different companies work together to bring Flash to multiple platforms.
So, I don’t get what the news is. That blog post is just a summary of what has been happening for a while now, anyway. Reiterating the commitment of the collaboration? Yeah, big deal.
Tell me what I might have missed.
BTW: Great that not everybody believes in dictatorship but choice. I am looking forward to these upcoming Tegra 2 based tablets running Flash at the end of the year.
but when talking about flash & air, I assume we are talking about app deployment and not web based flash. Right?
Air is a way to make your flash application into an application. So why the comparison to html5?
It makes perfect sense to me that if you could get air running well on a variety of platforms, you could have write-once, run-everywhere working pretty well.
I’m running Pandora via Air on Linux right now and its great. Why would anyone not want this option for Android?