You may soon be able to waste your life playing Farmville on the go, as Adobe is looking for beta testers for Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0 on Android.
You can sign up for Flash here and AIR here, but you have to first create a free Adobe account. Small price to pay, I say, as you’ll get first crack at how well Adobe is able to bring this web technology to your favorite smartphone.
“There are going to be so many interesting things that you will be able to do on Android and there are going to be many new skills that you will need to learn, especially if you are new to mobile design,” Adobe said in a blog post aimed at developers. “One thing that will help you tremendously is to learn more about optimizing content for mobile devices.”
It looks like Adobe’s on schedule to get its web technology on smartphones in the second half of the year and I wouldn’t be surprised to see betas for BlackBerry soon. It couldn’t come sooner, in my opinion, as Steve Jobs’ war on Flash is only going to get more intense.
To recap, Jobs doesn’t want this technology on the iPhone OS because he said it hogs resources and bogs down the overall experience. The fact that it offers a free counter to the App Store and iTunes probably doesn’t help, either. While the amount of Apple mobile device users is dwarfed by the number of Adobe users, major publishers like Netflix, The New York Times and others are moving away from the web plug-in model to reach iPhone and iPad users. It should also be noted that the full version of Flash isn’t available on any smartphone platform now.
Adobe’s not standing still though, as it could have the 10.1 version on every major smartphone platform by the end of the year (although it will only work on devices with capable hardware). If Adobe can get users conditioned to having the full web experience on every other device, this public pressure may get Apple to change its stance.
[Via The Flash Blog]