On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 5:42 PM, chris harper <ch393...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So what you are saying is that Android development doesn't really want > developers building applications that use Flash? > Only a few phones have Flash at this point so, no, I would not suggest using it. Longer term... well, it would be problematic for this to become a standard part of the Android SDK. Given that flash is proprietary, that would leave us with the platform becoming dependent on someone else's proprietary code in order to support these apps. This is very counter to a basic philosophy of Android, that the entire platform is open-source and thus you don't need to someone's proprietary code to build an "android compatible" device. (And to head off the inevitable cries about not really being open-source -- yes there are bits and pieces that are not open source, such as hardware drivers and applications like Market. This is a far cry from baking dependencies on non-open-source code into the standard APIs, though.) > But it now sounds like if anyone wants to develop an Android app that uses > Flash it'll be more of a gamble and might not work for most devices or at > the least be a hassle for the end user to make it work because they would > have to install Flash plugins. > I can't tell you what devices Flash may or may not be available on, because it is owned by Adobe. Clearly they have a self-interest in getting it as widely spread as possible, but from the perspective of the platform we can't make any guarantees about who can include it on a device, the kinds of hardware it can run on, and how well it would perform. And that is one of the big rubs. > It is kind of disappointing because if Android and Adobe can get together > and start supporting development of applications that use Flash then that > would be an Ace in the hole for making Android apps far better than the > IPhone. > The first step for having some technology adopted for the standard Android platform is to make it available under an open-source license that is compatible with the rest of the platform. Somehow, I don't see this happening for Flash. :} -- Dianne Hackborn Android framework engineer hack...@android.com Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
