为闪电辩论注入活力

Back in 2011, I wrote an article about the demise of Flash Player for Mobile. 那篇文章，"飞入(不那么)稀薄的空气," declared that Flash capabilities on mobile devices weren’t dead, but rather had morphed and continued to live on in a new form—the Adobe Integrated Runtime, 或air，这将继续发展.

Despite what I thought was careful wordsmithing to show that Flash Player capability was alive and well, the matter itself seems to have taken on a life of its own. Part of the issue may have been in the way Adobe announced that it was ending additional development on device-specific versions of Flash Player for Mobile, leading to the erroneous assumption that Flash capabilities were no longer available on mobile platforms.

Four years later, in early 2015, the debate continues. 简·奥泽最近写了一篇评论，题为闪电侠再次死亡(打哈欠)" that took on the assumptions on the part of the likes of CNET and Tech Radar that Flash Player was dying, even though all the major sites—including those two —still use Flash Player in their desktop-centric websites.  

Even more curious—and what caught my attention regarding the whole “Flash is Dead Again” debate—were a number of comments on a LinkedIn 社区组 saying that Adobe had abandoned mobile platforms like Android years ago.

Adobe将继续更新Flash, 这是真的, 但只适用于Windows和Mac OS,Jan Sunavec写道, 流媒体技术专家 B4B技术. "In the past they supported Linux and also Android devices. 这就是为什么我们可以说闪电侠正在消亡. Especially when mobile devices are crucial for video markets ... Point is there was Flash for Android, and now it's not. Adobe失去了一个相当大的市场."

I pointed out that Adobe didn’t abandon the Android platform, and has gained additional marketshare on the iOS platform in the past three years. True, Adobe abandoned the Flash Player for Android back in 2011. 然而, the AIR platform that developers can use to create apps for both iOS and Android is in parity with the current desktop version of Flash Player. Since apps are used to deliver much of the premium content viewed on mobile devices, this means that Flash is still very much alive on these platforms.

To add clarity to my comment on the LinkedIn thread, and to get a sanity check for what I thought was "old news" from several years ago, 我采访了克里斯·坎贝尔, Flash运行时组的高级产品经理.

坎贝尔是一位客户倡导者, 作为运行时工程团队的一员, he is responsible for both Flash Player on the desktop and AIR on mobile devices.

“AIR和Flash Player是平等的, regardless of whether it’s browser parity or platform parity,坎贝尔说。, 注意的是,, 截至本月初, 新的Flash Player 17已经在桌面上发布了, 这是手机版本, 以空气的形式, 是否与桌面版本同步.

"There are some code restrictions based on the platform, 比如Android或iOS,坎贝尔说。, "but AIR and Flash Player are typically released at the same time."

He went on to say that an example of a code restriction in the past might have been a request by the mobile team to offer iOS developers 64-bit support.

至于手机版的Flash Player, Campbell reiterated the shift in thinking that caused Adobe to move away from specialized versions of Flash Player for every single Android device.

"We are no longer doing development for Flash Player for Mobile,坎贝尔说。. "But we’ve added significant functionality to AIR since that time."

The main thing that AIR adds to the mix, according to Campbell, is OS-specific functionality. These are things that weren’t available in the native browser on a mobile device, 但在AIR中可用, allowing developers to take advantage of operating system calls through the Flash Builder or Flex programming environments.

Another area that Campbell said has been added is a plug-in structure for AIR.

“AIR原生扩展, 或一, 可以写入并插入到运行时吗,坎贝尔说。, ，以允许特定于平台的ANE, 甚至是特定于设备的ANE, 处理设备上的特定功能. An example of this might be an extension written to take advantage of an accelerometer or a biometric scanner, 因为这些不是在每个设备上都可用."

最后, 我问坎贝尔恐惧的原因, 早在2011年, about "app bloat" since the Flash engine would now be loaded in to every app, 而不是一次性驻留在设备上. 采用这种方法的原因, Adobe将其称为强制运行时特性, was to avoid an update to Flash Player for Mobile breaking mobile apps on the platform that required functionality from a previous version of Flash Player that may have been deprecated in the upgrade process.

"Captive runtime feature was first launched in AIR for iOS,坎贝尔说。. “这款游戏一开始并不能在Android上使用, but is now available on Android and Windows mobile platforms."

The benefit, Campbell says, is the ability to contain everything in the application itself.

"The end user doesn’t need to know that the AIR runtime is within the app,坎贝尔说。. "It’s been successful in the majority of applications, as we’ve continued to optimize the runtime engine to keep it relatively small compared to other assets—such as art assets for a game—that make up the total application’s size."