Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
Adobe is seriously doing it all wrong. They have to open-source the Flash Player and everything around it now. They can keep the IDE proprietary if that floats their boat, it's just a premium authoring tool, but the only way to save Flash is to open-source like NOW. HTML5 is still young enough that an open Flash Player and standard and protocol (RTMP) would effectively kill it.<p>Open-sourcing would open so many doors. Apple could modify Flash until it worked on iOS properly, Google could modify until it worked on Android. The reason this hasn't happened so far is that Adobe is a bottleneck nobody wants to deal with; they just consider basically impossible to get Flash Player on mobile because Adobe doesn't have the structure or the talent to do it correctly, and there is no other option except to let Adobe do it. An open Flash would open many doors, awesome adaptations, deployments, and uses that we can't yet think up would come out of it, and all the while Adobe would keep selling its IDE (probably selling more, actually, because Flash will then do cool stuff that everyone wants).<p>I don't know why they don't do this. Flash Player is already basically free, all of the money from Flash comes from the IDE Adobe sells. Keep the IDE locked up if you want, Adobe, but every second you keep the Player locked up you are killing Flash that much more, and when nobody uses Flash nobody is going to buy your IDE.<p>I know there are free software Flash players out there, but it's not the same. It's like saying nobody needs cooperation from nvidia because of nouveau. While a noble effort with meaningful results, vendor support still gets you much, much farther ahead.<p>If Adobe knows what's good for them they will be opening the Flash Player as quickly as they possibly can. They are going to be very sorry that they didn't. They probably will eventually take this route as a last-ditch effort when Flash content has dipped like 80% and been replaced by HTML5/JS, but that will be too late. This is Adobe's last chance, they must open it now if they expect any kind of future from it.<p>Flash is too big for Adobe alone, and if they don't want the whole thing to crash and burn totally and have that revenue dry up, they need to open ASAP. This should be the number one priority at Adobe.