Adobe spells out Flash-y plans for Android
Adobe may be leaving the flashy announcements to Nokia and Sony Ericsson this Mobile World Congress, but there are some plans pertaining to Flash that will impact a wide swatch of Android smartphones and tablets going forward.
Context & Ripple Effects
The roadmap here closes the loop on a promise made almost a year earlier, when Adobe's CEO committed to bringing Flash to Android, WebOS and BlackBerry smartphones and tablets in the second half of 2010. What has changed by February 2011 is that the pieces finally exist on desktop first: Flash Player 10.2 shipped on Windows, Mac and Linux days before MWC, introducing Stage Video, a fully hardware-accelerated video pipeline that is the technical precondition for making Flash usable on battery-powered devices.
The MWC framing matters because this is the show where Nokia's pivot toward Windows Phone under Microsoft is dominating headlines and Sony Ericsson is unveiling the Xperia Play — leaving Adobe, conspicuously quiet on stage, positioning Android as the flagship platform where its 'full web' argument gets proven against an iOS ecosystem that still refuses Flash.
First-order effects
- Android device makers heading into Mobile World Congress — Sony Ericsson among them — gain a concrete differentiator: handsets and tablets that can claim complete web playback where iPhones and iPads cannot.
- For Adobe, porting Stage Video from the February 9 desktop release to Android becomes the immediate engineering task, since hardware-accelerated decoding is what determines whether mobile Flash is a feature or a liability.
Second-order effects
- Apple's no-Flash stance turns from a design decision into a competitive talking point, as Android OEMs and carriers now have a marketing answer to the 'it just plays the whole web' objection.
- SoC and GPU vendors become gatekeepers of the experience: which chips ship qualified Stage Video support will shape which Android devices can credibly advertise HD Flash playback.
Third-order effects
- If the rollout holds, mobile browsing splits into a plugin camp and a plugin-free camp, forcing every platform vendor to pick a side in the HTML5-versus-Flash question rather than defer it.
- A successful Android deployment gives Adobe leverage to repeat the playbook on WebOS and BlackBerry, the other platforms named in its original cross-platform commitment.
The trend: Mobile platforms are hardening into two camps over rich web plugins — Android carrying Flash forward with hardware acceleration while Apple holds the line on HTML5 — and Adobe's MWC roadmap is the clearest signal yet of which way the volume vendors are leaning.