Follow-up: Why Adobe’s mobile strategy is fundamentally flawed
I'm not asking you to give up and go home. I'm asking you to stop playing the wrong game.
I initially wrote this as a comment in my previous post: Why Adobe's mobile strategy is fundamentally flawed as a response to Rachel Luxemburg's comment but it grew somewhat so, in the interest of keeping comments short and succinct, here it is in its own post:
The Follow-up: Why Adobe’s mobile strategy is fundamentally flawed article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
"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." (Rachel)
Nope, you're not getting my point: I'm saying that Flash (the IDE) and Flash (the frameworks, the language/AS3, etc.) are tremendously suited for the mobile space. In fact, they're probably the most rapid tools available for creating mobile experiences at the moment.
What I'm saying is that the Flash Player is not suited for the mobile space.
Adobe cannot differentiate the two. In fact Adobe sees the goal of the game as Flash Player penetration across mobile devices. When you talk about "giving up and going home" that would be a good thing because you're playing the wrong game.
The game should be: how can we get more developers to buy and use the Flash IDE (and perhaps Flash Builder too, one day) to build mobile experiences. Notice the *buy* bit. You guys actually make money by selling software licenses. So if people can build great experiences easily using your tools, they'll buy more of your tools. If those experiences end up second rate because they are severely handicapped by having to go through a limited VM on an already limited device, then they won't buy your tools.
So Adobe probably wants to get in on the game with mobile app revenues. Good market. Do you really think that any of the major operators or handset manufacturers want you to get a piece of that pie? At best they'll tolerate you as a second-class citizen on their platforms as an affront to Apple and the iPhone until they have their own stores and systems in place (I don't even really see that happening.) So you're back to not being able to monetize Flash on mobile, which leads to developers not creating content, and the whole enchilada that meant that Flash Lite was a failure (as Scott pointed out earlier, in apps, it has been used for phone UIs, although I wasn't impressed with any that I saw.)
"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." (Rachel)
You guys "chose" it because it's the only game Adobe/Macromedia knows. It's also Flash Player penetration that made Flash what it is on the web. But mobile is not the web and you're trying to implement the same strategy there. It's not going to work. The fragmentation is too great and whereas Flash was leading the medium on the web, you're playing catch-up on mobile. And you're focussing your energies on implementing features (in this case, cross-device support across a range of devices) while others are focussing on refining and redefining the bounds of what's possible in the realm of mobile user experience.
I'm not asking you to give up and go home. I'm asking you to stop playing the wrong game.
"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." (Rachel)
You're mixing up in-browser Flash support with standalone Flash application support on mobile devices. Sure, most device manufacturers want the former. It's a competitive advantage (for the most part, at least; see my note regarding Flash ads, etc. in the main article). I'm talking about standalone Flash apps. And there it's not in their best interests to make Flash a first-class citizen since they want to milk this lucrative cash cow themselves.
Finally, regarding the note that I'm going to "get very frustrated" that Adobe sticks to business as usual with its mobile strategy. Not at all. Do you seriously think developers sit idle, getting frustrated at technologies or tools these days? Nope, they move on because we are living in a wonderful supply market with an overabundance of tools, technologies, and platforms. The scarce resource today is developer time.
Personally, I'm already comfortable with Cocoa Touch and Objective-C and happily making apps for the iPhone. I am also very excited by the open web and the directions that Palm are taking with their WebOS and will be devoting my scarce time to at least learning their frameworks. I'm intrigued by Android – so much so that I might actually delve a little into Java and their frameworks if I ever end up getting an Android phone. Finally, I'm really excited about the iPhone export in Flash CS5 and I still feel that AIR has a lot to offer so I definitely will not be ignoring those.
But I don't see myself making a standalone Flash app for a mobile device in the future.
The Follow-up: Why Adobe’s mobile strategy is fundamentally flawed article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Aral,
Excellent article – It’s somewhat ironic that the only frustration, from what I can see, is coming from Rachel. Sure, everyone is excited about being able to develop iPhone apps in AS3, but I’m not so sure that Adobe can see past its own arrogance.
How were we supposed to act Rachel? Were we supposed to ignore the fact that there are infinite technologies which can be used to write mobile software? Apparently, that’s the stance they’re taking, because they confuse “don’t really care that much, but looking forward to trying it out” with “frustration.”
I’m only frustrated with Adobe when their products do not perform as they should, which happens a lot more than it should.
The #1 reason I’m extremely excited about the Flash enhancements for mobile development is the fact that it gives Adobe a reason to improve the overall performance of the non-mobile flash player :-)
[...] Update: Aral update. [...]
FWIW, I think you made your case better and with less flame potential this time. The first post came across a little arrogant and quite disjointed. It was less noisy and much more succinct this time around.
Agreed. Someone knows what they are talking about when it comes to Flash. Bravo. I am personally staying away from the game stuff and focusing on AIR apps. I think this is a really untapped market. With the “trend” moving to virtualization and cloud, web apps (Adobe products or not) might be the next major revenue generator, considering how this can affect businesses. Small to medium size companies can save alot of dinero by riding this new “trend” and I greeting them with a smile and a bag full on small business apps. GB
Just want to say that when Flash took up most of my development time, I went for the open source FlashDevelop IDE instead of the large bloated Adobe Flash CS3 IDE.
First its Free.
Its Lightweight.
Its fast.
Sure it doesn’t have any timeline tools, but for what I was trying to achieve I didn’t need them.
Indeed, I used to try and figure out where Adobe were making money from Flash, and my conclusion was… they weren’t. They were making more money milking Photoshop tools, not Flash.
Adobe needs to take a hard look at Microsoft’s VS IDE, and start looking after their developers more before MS Expressions takes off. They haven’t gotten the grasp of Graphic Design Tools yet (which Adobe also have a good experience with) but when they do, together with VS, they’ll be steamrolling over Adobe (IMHO).
Please stop whining. If you don’t like flash stop using it. It’s that simple. A coin always has two sides.
Use your blog to something creative instead.
Hi Peter,
Just wanted to say, I loved your comment. It’s a rather shallow world-view indeed that can manage to see things in such stark black and white (I rather envy your ability to do so.)
Where in my article did you read that I don’t like Flash? Was it the penultimate paragraph where I state that I’m excited about using the iPhone export feature in Flash CS5?
I’m also glad you have discovered that a coin has two sides. This is definitely progress (have you told Dr. Chamberly yet, she will be very pleased to hear it). And, although I’d hate to rain on your parade, a coin also has a third side: the edge. Think about that sometime (but slowly work up to it, we don’t want to blow any fuses!)
Finally, thank you for your wonderful suggestion as to what I can do with my blog. After a protracted period of strenuous soul searching, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to keep doing what I like with my blog for the time being. In the meanwhile, maybe you can give us a link to your own amazingly creative blog so we can learn about the creative ways in which we could be using ours from a true master.
ok i somehow agree with peter
if adobe strategies bother you so much, then why dont you keep your blog with all of those things that you say that cocoa and mac have instead?
Cannot agree more with you. Adobe will not be able to keep up with every device out there. Clearly the best strategy is to enable AS 3 compilation for major mobile platforms (iPhone, Android) in Flash IDE.
Here could be the answer the problem. The folks at open plug have developed a very nice plugin for flex that allows to publish your as3 code to different platform.
http://developer.openplug.com/
Seb, OpenPlug does look interesting. Looking forward to seeing more of it.
Hi Aral,
I just read your posts (it has been out since december)
Question one: What is happening here? I would like to read the core reason for your ranting.
(Here is mine about HTML5 and Flash: http://bit.ly/5bH1uG)
Adding to that: it is good to stir things up. I agree for other reasons that Flash is going to loose the game if they keep on going like the past decade.
Simply put: almost 14 years later we are still running all rendering in Flash over the CPU while the GPU is left unused – having crappy memory management over assets you use and thus crippling development of software via Flash and making the RIA hype they started in 2004 into a failure.
Main reason: running a Flash app gobbles up all your resources where native and HTML are more modest.
So: “Adobe – if you want to be a front runner – what the fuck are you doing now?”
The Flash mobile team seems to be picking up parts. Memory management and better hardware support seems to be on the list now. By teaming with the Flash core dev team, the new 10.x player should become faster and better.
Still I think it will be miles behind what other parties are achieving right now. See Unity3D. Also the WebKit developers seem to be kicking things forward using openGL and stuff natively.
As for the “open web” in general: as long as there are so many differences in implementations as there are browsers, the more rich possibilities for building web apps remain an unfulfilled promise like “better performance in Flash”.
In your two posts: why the emphasis on flash banners and “skip intro’s” without spending the same amount of words on flash sites which are surpassing that limited use? Where is the balance there according to you?