Mobile App Testing

Adobe’s Flash has not been playing nicely with mobile devices for years, but now the disagreement is coming to an end … and Flash is going away (on new mobile browsers, not all together). The announcement was made on Tuesday to Adobe partners via email. Here’s Wired with more details…

In an abrupt about-face in its mobile software strategy, Adobe will soon cease developing its Flash Player plug-in for mobile browsers, according to an e-mail sent to Adobe partners on Tuesday evening.

And with that e-mail flash, Adobe has signaled that it knows, as Steve Jobs predicted, the end of the Flash era on the web is coming soon.

The e-mail, obtained and first reported on by ZDNet, says that Adobe will no longer continue to “adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations,” instead focusing on alternative application packaging programs and the HTML5 protocol.

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores,” the quoted e-mail says.

…

The move indicates a massive backpedaling on Adobe’s part, a company who championed its Flash platform in the face of years of naysaying about its use on mobile devices. Despite Flash’s near ubiquity across desktop PCs, many in the greater computing industry, including, famously, Apple Computer, have denounced the platform as fundamentally unstable on mobile browsers, and an intense battery drain. In effect, Flash’s drawbacks outweigh the benefits on mobile devices.

Read the full article at Wired >>>

There’s a lot of talk these days about HTML5, specifically in regards to the web and what it means for the future of video. Did you not get the memo?

“Dear Desloper (Designer+Developer) community, HTML5 has introduced a <video> tag and all you need to do is give the source of your file and it will play videos in all the browsers and devices of the universe.”

Can it really be that easy? Nope. As the saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” – and the same applies to embedding video in HTML5.

The popularity of HTML5 becomes more and more important with the way arch-rivals Adobe and Apple get along with each other. The miserable deslopers start looking for an alternative to Flash to play video on Apple devices. HTML5 – and its <video> tag – is therefore seen as somewhat of a savior. No Flash or Quicktime to play a video? Where do I sign up?

However, with different parties supporting different video standards, the desloper community needs to keep in mind that they need to encode video into different formats so that various browsers can understand their video format.

For converting the video to iPhone, Apple provides a tool named Quick Time Pro which you can buy (or let your generous boss pay for it) for conversion purposes. Quick Time Pro will make your life easy to convert your video (Quick time format) file into MP4 which you can play on iPhone for both web and desktop applications.

The fun starts when you have to play H.264 video format in Mozilla Firefox (my favorite browser and probably most developers’ favorite too).

Read more…

From TechCrunch:

A week after launching the official release of Firefox 4, Mozilla is following up today with Mobile Firefox for Android and Maemo phones (for all twelve of you Maemo fans out there). For Android, the browser is now available on the Android Market,.

The Android browser fairly rocks. It almost makes me want to switch to Android. The mobile browser syncs all of your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and even open tabs with your Firefox browser on your desktop. So you can pick up browsing where you left off when you leave your desk. This syncing is huge. The browser won’t be availabl for the iPhoen anytime soon because of restrictions Apple places on browsing apps—for one thing, it doesn’t use Webkit. (But Mozilla does offer an iPhone app that syncs mobile Safari with your Firefox desktop browser).

One thing Firefox mobile doesn’t have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness. The focus right now is on HTML5 and CSS. It is amazing some of the 3D effects, animations, video, and other in-browser graphics you can now get with HTML5. Check out some of the demos here after you download Firefox to your phone.

Read the read of the article >>>

Take that Oracle! You just let Apple capture the lead in the 2010 Bug Marathon, otherwise known as Secunia’s Half Year Report (PDF). Worth the read, the 20-page report identifies the ten largest vendors with the most vulnerabilities (in all their products) and ranks them for the first half of 2010 – great entertainment for those who like to track bugs and keep score.

I mean, World Cup is over and nobody really cares about baseball until September, so perhaps this could help fill the competitive void in the meantime…

Anyway, here are the current “standings”:

1. Apple
2. Oracle
3. Microsoft
4. HP
5. Adobe Systems
6. IBM
7. VMware
8. Cisco
9. Google
10. Mozilla Organization

As noted earlier, this is really more of a marathon than a sprint, so it would be useful if we went back a little longer than six months to crown a winner. Thankfully, Secunia did just that as part of their key findings:

Read more…

From TechCrunch:

About 7 months after the release of Flash Player 10.1 for desktops (beta), Adobe has today announced it has shipped its mobile sister to partners worldwide.

Adobe unveiled a beta version of Flash Player for Android about a month ago, but has been dabbling with bringing Flash to mobile devices – including Android handsets – for much, much longer.

Make no mistake about it: Adobe really needs to get this completely right….

…All eyes are now on Adobe. Soon, the real testing will commence and it will continue for a couple more years as Flash Player makes its way to mobile platforms other than Android 2.2. By 2012, Adobe plans to have Flash 10.1 on more than half of all smartphones shipped – assuming no major market share changes.

Continue Reading…

It could be the string of lost calls, the lack of multi-tasking functionality, the non-removable battery – but for whatever reason, more and more users are switching to, well, anything but the iPhone.

Newsweek tech blogger Daniel Lyons is the latest to jump ship. He’s switching to Android. Here’s why:

I used to think that would be enough, that if I could just run my iPhone on Verizon, I’d be happy. Well, no more. The new version of Android—version 2.2, a.k.a. Froyo—blows the doors off the iPhone OS. It’s faster, for one thing. It also will support Flash, something Apple refuses to do, mostly out of spite.

The new Android OS will support tethering, meaning you can use your phone as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, connecting your computer to the Internet. Apple and AT&T say they’re going to offer tethering—someday. It’s just not clear when. Which is why, just to be mean, Google showed an Android phone tethered to an Apple iPad at Google’s developer conference this week. Big laughs all around.

Lyons’ criticisms are of course nothing new, as thousands of users have expressed similar frustrations. Though they might not agree, it’s important for mobile testers to keep this type feedback in mind when reviewing applications on these devices.

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“The future is bright for Flash,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “I hope it sticks around for decades to come. I really respect those guys over at Adobe.”

Kidding, kidding. According to this recent Wired story, what he really said was that Flash will KILL the mobile web if left to its own devices (no pun intended).

(UPDATE: Apple Facing Antitrust Inquiry Over Flash-to-iPhone Complier Ban?)

We’ve covered this before, and Stanton Champion wrote an excellent contrarian piece on this subject titled 5 Reasons Flash Is Here To Stay, but these latest developments highlight a new level of animosity that we just couldn’t resist. That, plus it has some major mobile testing implications. Here’s a telling excerpt from the Wired piece:

But the new public remarks echo some he made in private at a recent Apple Town Hall meeting where he disparaged Adobe as “lazy.” Now the Apple CEO says he has many technical and philosophical problems with Flash — six, to be precise — which would appear to make their differences irreconcilable.

“Flash was created during the PC era — for PCs and mice,” Jobs writes. “Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards — all areas where Flash falls short.”

Here is Steve Job’s entire blog post, where he discusses mobile usability, video formatting, mobile security and other topics near and dear to today’s mobile testers.

Read more…

The recent launch of the iPad was all the proof InfoWorld’s Galen Gruman (and about a thousand other bloggers)  needed to declare that Apple is out to kill Flash once and for all. Replacing the “resource-sucking” plugin, as many assume, will likely be the evolving HTML 5 browser standard – “likely” and “assume” being the key words.

Here’s the thing: everyone seems to sense that Flash is on its way out, but no one can really explain how or when it will get there. Will Flash retire without fanfare? Will it do its best IE6 impression and spend the rest of mobile eternity wandering the streets looking for fresh brains (i.e. annoying the heck out of developers)? Most important of all, will testers still be required to keep Flash in their repertoire?

The answer depends on who you ask. Stanton Champion says yes, in his recent 5 Reasons Flash is Here To Stay piece. Steve Jobs and Apple’s marketing team would argue just the opposite, which brings me back to Gruman’s original article. Writing about Apple’s plan to eliminate Flash going forward,  he writes:

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