No future for Flash Lite?

[atilacorreiacunha]

Hey guys,

with the advent of partnership between MS and Nokia, should we have silverlight focus and no more flash lite?

BR,

[manikantan]

Greetings Atila,

Flash can still be deployed on the 150m Symbian devices that Nokia would sell in the next 2 yrs.
Nokia is also working vigorously on revamping S3, so Symbian is going to be around for quite sometime.
And hence there is still a lot of opportunity around Flash Lite.

[adorable]

I'm praying for continued Flash (preferably Flash 10.x on all S60 and higher) player support!

Here's the mess:
1) iPhone - it's own SDK.
2) Android - it's own SDK.
3) Blackberry - it's own SDK.
4) Nokia - it's own SDK.
5) Windows - it's own SDK.
6) Palm - it's own SDK.

If there was no Flash, it would be silly to pay for 5 programmers to cover 6 platforms (or wait for the porting across 6 platforms).

Today, there's Flash on Blackberry, Android (Flash 10.x), upcoming on Palm (Flash 10.x) and Nokia (Flash Lite =( ). If only Windows and iPhone would LISTEN and release Flash player 10.x on each, poof! Development drops to only 1-2 Flash versions total for 6 platforms! Nice!!

Java is an alternative, but doesn't have universal installs across desktops - thus, another port to get a desktop version of your app in Java; none required with Flash.

---

In the end, it's not about what's 'best', but rather what can save us time & money as developers. The market is fragmenting far too much for my liking and the costs of tooling up for each platform that only has a slice of the whole market is just crazy.

Flash 'universalizes' an app so it can run on 'everything', and Flash 10.x would be much appreciated on S60 on up. (Yes, even S60^5 regardless of actual video playback performance. A few fps is fine for MPEG4 videos and such as long as the rest - vector graphics, animation, text, etc. - work just the same as desktop Flash 10.x.)

Push Microsoft to include Flash 10.x in W7!

[petrib]

In the end, it's not about what's 'best', but rather what can save us time & money as developers.

In the end, 'best' for manufacturers is what makes most money to manufacturers (primarily in the short-term, but to some degree also in the longer term), not what saves developers time & money.

If saving developers' time and money was 'best' for manufacturers, then we wouldn't have the fragementation of operating systems, tools and programming languages, and their different versions that we live with today.

[rajan.mba]

Sigh ! Life was good before iphone came from no where and messed up the whole ecosystem. How I wish Steve jobs would have retired with pancreatic cancer before iphone development. That guy knows how to sell even a slab of mud like its a new technology. I wish Nokia would hire him as the CEO for a few years atleast.

[biskero]

Ciao,

couple of stats to add:
1 - there are 75/100 M Symbian devices in the market supporting FL
2 - Nokia plans to sell another 150 M, this is potential, not there yet
3 - there are 600 M S40 devices in the market, most of them run FL. If you target FL2.1 you can deploy on all S40 5th FP1 and later

At the MWC, Nokia mentioned that they are going to focus marketing spending on S40 with OVI Store since until now it was not pushed much.
So a great opportunity still for FL.

By the way, I ported one game to Nokia X2 qwerty phone which was announced for T-Mobile and it was approved in OVI Store in 2 days!
Not sure if this will work for everyone, but might be a sign that content is needed for S40 phones.

Alessandro

[sangramp@cybage.com]

Stay Tunned!

With Nokia using Windows 7 OS, there are good chances to have Adobe Air supported on Nokia devices.

Currently Adobe Air 2.5 is supported on Android Froyo, IOS and I am sure Adobe is working for Windows 7 version. If Air is supported then, there are huge apportunities for development. Adobe Air is much powerfull and gives seamless access to all native capabilities irrespective of underlying OS. We can use the same code and package the app for Andorid, IOS (even today) and may be Windows 7 devices in coming future.

Adobe Air is quite same as desktop Flash and hence migrating to Adobe Air would not be a big deal for FlashLite developers.

[petrib]

Is your "Stay Tunned!" based on facts you know for sure, or your own speculation/assumptions?

As to speculation/assumptions: Adobe would still have to convince Microsoft to allow an Adobe runtime on WP7 phones, as opposed to Microsoft's own Silverlight, which is more or less a direct competitor to Flash. I'm not at all sure that Microsoft wants to allow Flash on WP7 as they've locked WP7 down more tightly than what Apple has done on iOS (iPhone, iPad).

[biskero]

Ciao,

I have talk to people at MWC and it's unlikely that WP will run anything that is now Microsoft software.
Alessandro

[shpe]

hope the WRT technology to be ported to WP7, this way flash would be a valid technology to develop apps for WP7 (flash inside a WRT and could use the WRT's APIs)

I'll be totally convinced if those home-screen widgets from WP7 could be also the symbian WGZ files... (and of course the WRT APIs must be there too)

another cool idea for WP UI: currently with UP-DOWN moves in homescreen scrolls to the widgets(hubs); with LEFT-RIGHT swipes inside the hub's box could scroll trough it's items and gain instant access to a photo, a game, contacts(maybe sorted by most used)...

[petrib]

hope the WRT technology to be ported to WP7, this way flash would be a valid technology to develop apps for WP7 (flash inside a WRT and could use the WRT's APIs)

Nokia's WRT wouldn't be enough magic to get Flash (WRT doesn't come with Flash, but within a WRT widget which runs in a browser instance context, you can use the built-in Flash Lite browser plugin).

[biskero]

Ciao,

yeap and WRT will not make it to WP!
Pretty much all current technologies present on Nokia devices will not be in WP.
Alessandro

[powerpixels]

If we are talking in long term, flash lite certainly has no future because it will evolve to flash 4 and air. Anyway, it will take at least 2 years for flash 4 to become dominant over flash lite.
About silverlight, it just can't take over the position of flash simply because there's not so many silverlight developers.

[atilacorreiacunha]

Someone from Nokia told me to keep my focus on S60 5th edition applications, because it was 85% of the Nokia market.

I was thinking about this, I mean, people who buy S40 device don't like to spend to much money on cellphones, then they are not good costumers.

Just to remember that I'm thinking like an independent developer, that wants to sell apps at Ovi. Of course that I know that big/medium companies could make cases for this series.

[biskero]

Ciao,

I would not discard S40 since there are 600M on the market and at the MWC, Nokia clearly stated that they intend to push OVI Store marketing strategy for S40.
So I will put more content on those devices in the coming weeks/months.

The info that you mention about spending it makes sense, people with a smartphone are more likely to spend more money!
But keep in mind that those people with S40s are the one that might pay with carrier/operator billing.

Alessandro