Not to mention, those pesky porn tubes always limit your viewing experience on their mobile version, and they only let you watch something like a couple of videos before asking you to pay.

I prefer to live in a gated community, where some one is ~working~ for me to keep bad stuff out. I truly want freedom to do things I want to do without worrying about such things. I want technology to be out of my way. So some times I don’t want people to offer me crappy stuff in the garb of additional choices. I really don’t have time for that. ( although I do seem to have time to be compelled to respond to you! – but that’s who I am)

Freedom to do ~ whatever~ you want is meaningless. Every nerd will acknowledge this fundamental observation in any community. For instance you don’t really have freedom to to steal or break any law. You dont even have to go to that extreme to see Freedom always has limits. For instance you really dont have the freedom to leave your house unlocked, even if you wanted to, for some one with malicious intent can break into your house. Freedom to do crappy stuff is also not really any meaningful freedom either. No one wants to buy a crappy stuff when a good alternative is present. Offering the crappy stuff as an additional choice, is certainly not freedom but a marketing gimmick especially by those who make money selling crappy stuff. You see the offer of an additional choice in such circumstances is cynical play by sellers of crappy stuff to be in the play, and make themselves relevant. They shift the attention from crappiness of their stuff to a fight for a higher ideal of allowing for choice, when really there never was a choice. They hope they can get some misguided people to buy their crappy stuff because those misguided people love choice, which really has nothing to with the quality of their product. Eventually they hope it becomes an emotional issue with those who love choice. They hope the people loving choice will emotionally bond with their crappy stuff so that they can be their biggest evangelicals against those who point out what their products really are – crappy.

The problem with flash ( and Android in general ) is precisely this – a promise of psuedo freedom. Flash is so crappy in performance that most high end Android phones cannot play 720p videos on it. Many can’t even play 480p videos ( HTML 5 can easily do that on the other hand on the same devices). Further Flash is absolutely useless when trying to run resource intensive games like FarmVille. Needless to say as it is a browser plugin, it has a tremendous overhead in performance when comparable activities can easily be performed by native applications. Heck these obvious limitations of Flash on mobile devices was there for all to see from the beginning itself, yet people loving choice and not exactly caring to know what it really means kept on pumping up the hot air in the flash bandwagon. Guess what happened – then reality hit them. Any good product will sell itself. With Android selling gangbusters and key players of the mobile industry doing joint research with Adobe to make their devices work well with flash you might wonder why did they really pull the plug on Flash for mobiles? Adobe really does not want to acknowledge this – the simple reason why they had to pull the plug was flash for mobiles was crappy.

As a final comment on Flash, Flash npt only is a resource hog but is also a source of additional security threats. You just have to do a simple search on Google’s very own search engine to see the number of times Adobe itself had to issue security patches to Flash for mobiles.

So come again what is so great about choice on Android?

I’m not sure why everyone thinks this means adobe will do this when they have stated they are abandoning the mobile space…

*edit* excuse me, I meant QBasic. Point still stands.

Some people do make their decision solely because something supports Flash. My mother recently got back from Best Buy trying out different tablets (iPad2 vs. Playbook vs. variety of Android). She said they all seem about the same to her, except the iPad2 won’t load Flash stuff.

Therefore, for her, iOS was completely dismissed for that sole reason.

Only if there were very specific requirements set.

“That said, apps built for ICS, utilizing its hardware acceleration, will be much smoother and faster running than previous attempts.”

Correction: hardware acceleration has always been available, but the default setting is OFF per app until ICS. It’s a simple setting when developing an Android app to turn it on.

“Adobe has recently came out and said that they are throwing flash away, primarily for mobile devices, and instead concentrating on HTML5, which is smart, it is the future, and will reach a much larger range of products than Flash ever did.”

99% penetration is pretty high. Granted, that is the numbers Adobe claims. That said, HTML5 doesn’t have near the same capabilities as Flash. Be prepared to be disappointed when you want to do something other than watch a video.

“Flash also noticeably slows down ANY mobile browsing, which is one of the reasons Apple phones do so well in browsing benchmarks, they don’t have all that flash to load. HTML5 will be much less resource intensive, and will really let Android browsing shine!”

I don’t even know where to start with this:
1) Browser benchmarks are not loading plugins on the benchmark pages.
2) The stock browser in Android also does not automatically load plugins on a web page unless you tell it to (either set it to always run in the settings or tap on the area where the plugin is supposed to be).
3) HTML5 is much more of a CPU hog even with simple animations compared to it’s Flash counterpart. Yes, this has been documented. Playback of certain videos on certain platforms may give a different result, and there are other reasons for this (it’s browser support on that platform, mostly). I don’t understand why everybody assumes it’s all super magical.

Ugh. So tired of people referencing HTML5 as if it’ll make your browser run 500x faster when loading 20 HTML5 “enhanced” ads. Free tip: it won’t.

The problem arises when doing more complicated native libraries that might need to be recompiled using the latest NDK if it links to something has changed. It could also be that Adobe took some shortcut and used some private API that has changed now.

In the case of flash, it’s a browser plugin using a native library. I’m guessing the issue might simply be that they need some changes to allow it to be used by the new browser. Do note that iOS doesn’t allow browser plugins at all as far as I know so you can’t really compare that.

Finally, you claim that iOS apps never need updates for newer releases. Have you completely missed how many apps are needing to be updated during the beta period before every “big” release? I follow the news on both sides and in that regard I’d say iOS might actually be worse than Android in terms of needing upgrades for popular apps. In any case there isn’t any big difference there.

Given the following options:

1. The software isn’t available
2. The software can be installed if a users really wants to but isn’t preinstalled

How could anyone prefer that option 1 is forced on all users of the OS?

Give me a break. Just because you use an iDevice doesn’t mean you don’t want to use Flash. What is the big deal about giving people the ability to view half the web?

My best guess, Adobe asked for money to help dev. Flash for android, Google told them “pfft, yeah right.” And now their new reference handset is missing the platforms greatest selling point.

Either ICS has so many changes under the hood that Adobe Flash is in compatible with it, which proves my point on severeness of Fragmentation of Android or Flash is so crappy on ICS that it will destroy user experience, that Google deliberately left it out.

In either case, it is + one for Apple. Apple has lesser ( though not non existent ) problem of fragmentation and knew Flash sucked long time back.

Flash in itself is a bad thing but as 10+ years of internet have produced tons ofwebsites with flash on it that never get migrated to htlm5 it is a hood thing to have some flash player on your device.

On a tablet this is kind of a dealbreaker for me; I’m not gonna sit around with a 10.1 inch screen and look at mobile sites.

WTF is a flash reader app?

I’m sorry, but you don’t appear to have any clue as to what you are taking about.

Google and Samsung failed to mention that flash(the browser plugin) was not included nor available for the new nexus. They follow up by then saying “I dunno, ask Adobe”

That’s some bullshit.

In the end I don’t really give a fuc because my preferred device is an ipad and I rarely use flash on my EVO3d… But people need to call out Google, Samsung, and Adobe on this.

Adobe suddenly pulling support for mobile flash is exactly the kind of shit Steve jobs was worried about. Took them 2 years to get it on android, then after all that hype… Drop it like no big deal.

Not a huge deal… Until you remember that flash is (was) the main selling feature of android.