Posted on 04/10/2010 6:45:23 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Adobe is fighting to extend its reach into the mobile market thanks to Flash Mobile 10.1. Flash Mobile 10.1 will be made available for all major mobile platforms except for Apple's iPhone OS. Apple has been notoriously apprehensive of Flash and Steve Jobs has continually stated that Flash is a CPU hog and crashed Mac computers.
With mobile devices like smartphones exploding in sales and becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, Adobe is sensitive to anything that could possibly threaten its position in this marketplace. Today, we're beginning to learn just how afraid Adobe is of Apple's insistence that websites push Flash to the side and instead embrace HTML5.
According to BusinessWeek, an SEC filing by Adobe today explains that Apple's clout and the prevalence of its popular devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad directly threaten its business.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytech.com ...
fyi
Nonsense.
SEC fillings have to mention any potential threats. It happens to be the law. Microsoft has been mentioning the “threat” from Linux in their SEC filings for over 10 years now, and Linux still has just 1% of the desktop market.
Reality, the iPhone's market share on the internet is insignificant.:
This is one of those Jerk vs Jerk stories that you’ve got to love.
Huh? A Mac computer can crash? Who knew?
Some websites, like Nike.com, are built almost entirely around Flash.
On the other hand, it is also true that sites that make extensive use of Flash, like nike.com, are absurdly slow to load, and sometimes do cause problems with my browser, whether Safari/Mac 10.6.3 or Firefox/Windows Pro.
I find purely flash sites load really, really, fast.
Of course, they are utterly worthless to me (and, I suspect, to anyone with sight problems), since I won’t install flash
Nike.com took about ten seconds to load. I am running XP on 2gb memory. I have never had a Flash site crash my PC or laptops.
Flash is a resource hog. Many of the most useful sites on the web do not use it. Thank you Free Republic, Drudegreport, craiglist etc . . .
Better to have an “opt-in” site with flash. Why burden the bandwidth with uneccessary bilge? If you want flash, click on it to choose. The flash cookies, .sol thing is another boondoggle alltogether.
I just clicked o the link above to Nike.com. Loaded in 4 seconds flat on my Win 7 laptop.
Flash has never crashed my computer before. I am not sure what Steve Jobs is smoking here.
98% of PC’s use it.
“Thank you Free Republic”
Free Republic is not a video site, and when Freerepublic posts videos here at the top of new threads, most of the videos use Flash.
> 98% of PC’s use it.
So do most Macs, but what does the percentage of computers with Flash installed have to do with the number, or usefulness, of websites that employ it?
I have FlashBlock installed on all my computers, and only view Flash where and when I want to. The lack of Flash crap ads has made my web browsing infinitely more pleasant.
I find that websites fall into three categories:
>> “Thank you Free Republic”
> Free Republic is not a video site, and when Freerepublic posts videos here at the top of new threads, most of the videos use Flash.
It's not a matter of being a "video site". Some business sites (third group above) with no video, nonetheless employ Flash in their page navigation and other mission-critical functions, meaning that without Flash enabled, I can't see the site, but with Flash enabled, I'm bombarded by annoying and time-consuming crap, just to get a nav button to display.
I second the appreciation of the fact that FreeRepublic does not require Flash to navigate and enjoy the site. I think that's the point.
Every “useful site” that streams video that I use has Flash, including all my favorite sports sites that I visit all the time like NBA.COM, MLB.COM, Foxsports.com etc etc.
I find my Flash essential for my web browsing.
As far as mobile browsing is concerned, Adobe and Google are busy developing Flash for Android smart phones even as we speak. With Android catching up very fast with the iPhone in mobile browsing market share, I doubt if Apple's plot to blackmail, browbeat and intimidate Adobe is going to get anywhere.
http://erictric.com/2010/03/29/android-approaching-iphone-os-in-mobile-web-market-share/
Looking at the trajectory, Android will likely shoot past the iPhone in web browsing market share, long before the end of this year. That will be a major boost for Flash, and considerably weaken Apple's ability to blackmail Adobe. This is not about Flash being "buggy and slow" like the Applebots keep parroting from Steve Jobs. This is about a pure ego trip and power grab by Steve Jobs. He is not going to get anywhere thanks to Android.
Luckily, I don't use an Apple product myself so Steve Jobs can go take a jump for all I care.
I’ve long thought Adobe sucks and Flash is little more than a virus dressed as an app.
And there is STILL no Flash player for 64-bit browsers.
Oh, this is “cool” ... (or “crazy”... whichever) — a software company wanting “government help” against Apple’s “juggernaut” of iPhone/iPad ... LOL ...
That’s “choice” ... for sure... :-)
Huh? A Mac computer can crash? Who knew?
My experience is that this is very rare. What they're talking about is crashing other applications... doncha know... the computer and Mac OS X keeps in running.
But, still having Adobe trash/crashware does present problems to other applications that may be running at the time... :-)
Monday, 25 January 2010
In my “Tablet Musings” piece two weeks ago, I speculated that Apple’s imminent tablet probably won’t support Flash, for all the same reasons the iPhone doesn’t. Reaction to this was polarized — typically either “duh, of course it won’t” or “no way, it has to support Flash”. You can see both reactions represented in the thread on my piece at Hacker News. One group is going to be very surprised come Wednesday.
I’ve been writing about this saga for two years. My fascination with the subject is fueled by the fact that it’s so polarizing, and that it encompasses both technical and political issues.
ON FLASH AND MAC OS X APPLICATION CRASHES
Two weeks ago I wrote:
To my knowledge, Apple controls the entire source code to the iPhone OS. That’s not to say they wrote the whole thing from scratch. Many low-level OS components are open source. But they have the source. If there’s a bug, they can fix it. If something is slow, they can optimize or re-write it. That is not true for Mac OS X, and Flash is a prime example. The single leading source of application crashes on Mac OS X is a component that Apple can’t fix.
Several readers asked me for the source for my accusation contained in that last sentence, that Flash is the “leading source of application crashes on Mac OS X”. (And good for them for asking; I’m not sure what I was thinking including that without sourcing it.)
Here’s the deal. On stage at the WWDC 2009 keynote address last June, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Bertrand Serlet was explaining the new web content plugin mechanism for Safari in Snow Leopard. Rather than run within Safari’s application process, web content plugins now run in their own process, so if they crash, they (usually) don’t crash Safari itself. You get a broken little rectangle in the page where the plugin was executing, but the browser itself stays running.
Apple did this for two reasons. Serlet’s stated reason on stage was “crash resistance”, as mentioned above. As for why such crash resistance was worth implementing, Serlet explained that, based on data from the Crash Reporter application built into Mac OS X — the thing that asks if you’d like to send crash data to Apple after a crash — the most frequent cause of crashes across all of Mac OS X are (or at least were, pre-Snow Leopard) “plugins”.
Serlet didn’t name any specific guilty plugins. Just “plugins”. But during the week at WWDC, I confirmed with several sources at Apple who are familiar with the aggregate Crash Reporter data, and they confirmed that “plugins” was a euphemism for “Flash”.
In other words, in Apple’s giant pile of aggregate crash reports — from all app crashes on all Macs from all users who click the button to send these reports to Apple — Flash accounts for more of them than anything else. That doesn’t mean Flash somehow causes crashes in any various app. Presumably, most of the time it’s Safari or some other browser playing Flash content. And it’s worth noting that this doesn’t necessarily mean Flash is particularly crash-prone or poorly engineered. Think of it as a formula like this:
total crashes = (crashing bugs) × (actual use)
Flash’s number and severity of crashing bugs could well be somewhat low and it would still account for a large number of total crashes because it’s actually used all the time — by any Mac user with Flash content playing in a web page. And, if Flash Player for Mac OS X actually is poorly-engineered overly-buggy code, well, that’s even worse.
But there’s another reason why Apple created this new external process architecture for web content plugins in Snow Leopard: it was the only way they could ship Safari and the WebKit framework as 64-bit binaries. Flash Player is only available as a 32-bit binary. (This is true for other third-party web content plugins, like Silverlight, but Flash is the only one that ships as part of the system.) 64-bit apps cannot run 32-bit plugins. Apple doesn’t have the source code to Flash, so only Adobe can make Flash Player 64-bit compatible. They haven’t yet. So if Apple wanted Safari to be 64-bit in Snow Leopard (and they did), they needed to run 32-bit plugins like Flash in a separate process.
Maybe you don’t believe Apple that web content plugins are the most frequent source of crashes on Mac OS X. Maybe you don’t believe me and my unnamed sources at Apple that it’s Flash in particular that accounts for this. That’s cool, skepticism is good. So then in that case, maybe Bertrand Serlet blamed “plugin crash resistance” for political reasons, just to stick a knife in Adobe’s back, and the only reason Apple went with this external-process architecture was for the 64-bit/32-bit incompatibility.
But that just shines a light on the fact that Flash is still a 32-bit binary despite the fact that Apple wants to go 64-bit system-wide. Flash remains 32-bit and there’s nothing Apple can do about it. Instead of being able to make Flash 64-bit themselves, Apple had to engineer an entirely new plugin architecture.
This is why Apple wants to control the source code to the entire OS. If they want to go 64-bit with iPhone OS, it’s entirely in Apple’s own control to do so. And what happens if Apple goes to a new CPU architecture? For the components Apple controls the source code to, they can recompile for the new architecture. If the entire system doesn’t recompile cleanly for the new architecture, they can work on it until it does. For a component like Flash, where Adobe controls the source code, Apple instead has to wait.
Which situation do you think Apple is happier with? Mac OS X, where they had to create a new web content plugin architecture because Flash crashes frequently and isn’t 64-bit? Or iPhone OS, where they control the source code to every single component, and can do whatever they want, when they want?
Point is, even if you think Flash Player for Mac OS X is the greatest piece of software in the world and that a Flash Player for iPhone OS would run just fine, too — there’s no denying that Apple executives have said and continue to say anti-Flash things publicly. Apple doesn’t say much about Flash, but what they do say doesn’t sound like the sort of things they’d say if they were looking forward to supporting it more rather than less.
THE PROPRIETARY WEB
It’s probably pretty clear to regular DF readers that I don’t care for Flash, and that I’m hoping Apple never includes it in the iPhone OS. Might as well make my biases clear.
Why? At the core, because Flash is the only de facto web standard based on a proprietary technology. There are numerous proprietary web content plugins — including Apple’s QuickTime — but Flash is the only one that’s so ubiquitous that it’s a de facto standard. Flash is the way video is delivered over the web, and Adobe completely controls Flash. No other aspect of the web works like this. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all open standards, with numerous implementations, including several that are open source.
The simplest argument in favor of Flash support on the iPhone (and The Tablet, and everywhere) is that Flash is, by dint of its popularity and ubiquity, part of the web. But the best argument against Flash support is that it is harmful to the web as a whole to have something as important as video be in the hands of a single company, and the only way that’s going to change is if an open alternative becomes a compelling target for web publishers.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. Publishers use Flash for web video because Flash is installed on such a high percentage of clients; clients support Flash because so many publishers use Flash for web video. Apple, with the iPhone, is solving the chicken and egg problem. For the first time ever, there is a large and growing audience of demographically desirable users who don’t have Flash installed. If you want to show video to iPhone users, you need to use H.264.
Apple isn’t trying to replace Flash with its own proprietary thing. They’re replacing it with H.264 and HTML5. This is good for everyone but Adobe.
And yes, I know Flash does much more than just play video. But that’s the main thing everyone is talking about when they talk about Flash not working on the iPhone — video. And when you talk about other uses for Flash, you’re talking about serving as a software runtime, and whether you like it or not, Apple has a clearly stated opposition to third-party software runtimes for iPhone OS, and that policy seems to be working out pretty well for them.
Here’s an email I got from a DF reader:
I was in line waiting for a coffee on Christmas day. In front of me was a kid, about nine or ten, who had an iPhone. He clearly had gotten it that morning. He was pushing frantically at a white box on a web page with the broken plug-in symbol. He was squeezing it, swiping it. He was frustrated and on the verge of getting pissed with his new toy. It seemed like he was trying to hit an online game page, probably one he was used to playing on the family PC. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I leaned over and said, “It won’t load Flash. It won’t play your Flash games.” His mom, ignoring him up to that point, was triggered by a stranger talking to her kid. “That’s okay honey,” she said, “we’ll get you a game from the App Store.” His response to this? He started working that device even harder. He didn’t want an App Store game; he wanted his Flash game. And that iPhone suddenly took a huge dive in value to him.
Like it or not, Apple needs to come to terms with this. If only for the kids.
I think this anecdote, and this reader’s takeaway from it, accurately captures the feeling behind much of the “Apple has got to bend on this eventually” sentiment that’s out there.
But think about it from Apple’s perspective. How do you think this situation turned out in the long run? Do you think the kid told his mom to return the iPhone for a refund? Or, do you think they went home and started buying games from the App Store? That there was a period of initial frustration due to Flash games not playing doesn’t change the fact that they (a) bought an iPhone and (b) were set to buy games from the App Store.
I’m not arguing that Apple’s apparent executive-level antipathy toward Flash is about anything other than Apple’s own interests. (I do think, though, that Apple’s WebKit team is genuinely idealistic about helping the web as a whole.)
But while Apple may be acting spitefully, they’re not spiting themselves. The iPhone’s lack of Flash has not hurt it one bit. Perhaps that will change in the future, if Flash someday proves popular on other mobile platforms, but don’t hold your breath.
FLASH PERFORMANCE ON MAC OS X
In addition to the principled concerns outlined above regarding Flash being proprietary, there are also practical issues. One, Flash’s aforementioned crashiness on Mac OS X. Second, crashiness aside, its performance on Mac OS X is not as good as it is on Windows. And for video playback specifically, Flash’s performance pales compared to H.264 played through QuickTime. This is not subjective. My machine is a two-year-old MacBook Pro. It plays full-screen H.264 video through QuickTime without problem. When I play full-screen Flash video, my fan kicks in within a few seconds, every time.
I’ve been hard on Flash Player for Mac OS X, but this performance situation is not entirely in Adobe’s hands. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. This is one reason why Flash video playback performs better on Windows than Mac OS X, and also why H.264 playback on Mac OS X is better through QuickTime (which does use hardware decoding).
According to Adobe, though, this is because they can’t. Here’s an entry from their Flash Player FAQ:
Q. Why is hardware decoding of H.264 only supported on the Windows platform?
A. In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate when to support this feature on Mac and Linux platforms in future releases.
Adobe platform evangelist Lee Brimelow recently posted a weblog entry addressing this:
But let’s talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let’s take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. I’m happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.
I’m aware of no reason to dispute this. Windows is more hospitable to a third-party runtime like Flash than Mac OS X. I think most would agree that Apple is an opinionated company (to say the least), and they make opinionated products. The runtimes Apple cares about are Cocoa and WebKit. The Apple way to play H.264 is through the QuickTime APIs (and really, as of Snow Leopard the new QuickTime X APIs), not to write your own H.264 playback code that seeks to directly access hardware accelerators.
You can argue about why Apple has taken this stance. One could argue that it’s pragmatic — that Apple doesn’t allow third-party software access to things like hardware H.264 acceleration because it seeks to maintain a layer of abstraction between third-party software and the underlying hardware. One could argue that it’s political — that Apple is happy to make Flash look bad performance-wise because Flash is competitive with Apple products in several different regards. (E.g. you may wish that Hulu, which is entirely Flash-based, worked on your iPhone and worked better on your Mac. Apple wishes that Hulu’s content was going through the iTunes Store.)
I would argue that it’s both — that Apple’s distaste for Flash Player is both a matter of engineering taste (that third-party software should only have access to high-level APIs) and politics. But objectively, regardless of what you personally wish Apple would do with regard to Flash, if Adobe needs Apple to grant them further access to the hardware to make the Mac version of Flash Player better, what are the odds that they’d get that sort of low-level hardware access on the iPhone OS? (Hint: zero.)
I’ll leave the last word to Apple COO Tim Cook, who a year ago said, “We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”
Flash is owned and controlled by Adobe.
The future is HTML5, not Adobe Flash. Dinosaurs once roamed the earth, but no more.
Graphic content on the web wasn’t going to be proprietary forever.
Yes, today nike.com is doing well. Most of the time when I go there it runs really slowly after clicking back and forth a few times while comparison shopping.
Flash has never crashed my computer either, but it has caused my browser to freeze up, usually with video but not wholly.
Please give me a link to the doc with the graph you posted, I'd like to study this a bit.
> Every “useful site” that streams video that I use has Flash, including all my favorite sports sites that I visit all the time like NBA.COM, MLB.COM, Foxsports.com etc etc. I find my Flash essential for my web browsing.
Ah, then we are looking for different things. I rarely view streaming video (maybe two or three 3-minute clips per week), but I spend a lot of time reading text (you know, articles). I am probably in the minority in that regard.
> ...Apple's plot to blackmail, browbeat and intimidate Adobe... Apple's ability to blackmail Adobe... Applebots keep parroting... a pure ego trip and power grab by Steve Jobs...
Ummm, Joe, Apple's activities that you're slamming are legal, everyday, capitalist business practice.
Apple is just a very successful capitalist company, doing legal business in a competitive market. Not "blackmail" (which is illegal).
This is the real world of business. Your apparent fear of Apple's success blinds you to the facts of what they're doing. It's just business, and they're good at it. (Note: I dislike some of Apple's policies, and find their general attitude elitist and off-putting; I'm only speaking here of their success in business.)
> Luckily, I don't use an Apple product myself...
I'd never have guessed. :)
http://erictric.com/2010/03/29/android-approaching-iphone-os-in-mobile-web-market-share/
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8
“Apple's activities that you're slamming are legal, everyday, capitalist business practice”
Sure its legal. That doesn't mean it makes much business sense or even that consumers like it.
In any case, the markets will settle this fight as usual, as other mobile OS’s continue to support Flash and their market shares continue to increase. By this time next year, both Android and Win 7 will have Flash. Win 6.5 already has Flash.
” Your apparent fear of Apple's success blinds you to the facts of what they're doing. It's just business, and they're good at it.”
I am starting to doubt how it makes business sense to keep trashing Flash, when Apple's current most successful competitor, Android is busy embracing Flash. Seems like Steve Jobs is throwing a temper tantrum to me. Business should never be about petulance.
We will see how the iPhone’s market share does in the next 12 months won't we?
With superb Android phones like HTC Desire already hitting the international markets, and the very good Win 6.5 HD2, already selling like hot cakes here on T-Mobile, I'd be very surprised if the iPhone’s market share is not down quite a bit by December.
HTC Desire.
That's true. But I have observed higher CPU utilization watching hi-resolution Flash videos on the Mac vs Windows.
HTML 5 is just fine, but it's no reason Apple shouldn't sit down with Adobe and figure out how to make Flash run just as well on Mac OS as on Windows.
I just tried the nike.com site. The first two levels (language selecction) loaded right away. The video on the main page took maybe four seconds. I think they probably have it set to buffer the whole thing or a large part of it. It's better to take a little while up front and then show the movie smoothly than to hiccup midway thru because of network delay.
Somehow, Joe, I doubt that, and I highly doubt that chart... considering that there are over 85,000,000 iPhoneOS units in the wild compared to under 4,000,000 total Android units. That chart comes from a very limited sample. According to the latest reports, the iPhone/iPod touch has 64% of the Mobile web browser share... and that will only start climbing with the iPad joining into that mix. Also, RIMM's share is higher than what that chart shows... by a lot. Very misleading chart.
It's true the AdMob is owned by Google now. Nevertheless they had a good reputation in the mobile web ad market before they were acquired by Google..
” considering that there are over 85,000,000 iPhoneOS units in the wild compared to under 4,000,000 total Android units.”
Going by Comscore figures, Android more than doubled their market share in just 3 months, and as at Feb, the iPhone had approx 2 1/2 times the install base of Android. Also, note that iPod's (mostly used to play music), might not necessarily be used as much for browsing as Android phones
You will notice that RIM has by far the biggest market share in install base, but that doesn't necessarily translate to a high market share in web browsing. The Androids are punching above their weight in the web briing deportment.
That chart comes from a very limited sample. According to the latest reports, the iPhone/iPod touch has 64% of the Mobile web browser share...”
Those are Apple's figures. They don't necessarily gel in with figures from Comscore and others.
” and that will only start climbing with the iPad joining into that mix. “
There is a flood of really hot new Android phones hitting market right now, which will likely trump any iPad sales.
“Also, RIMM’s share is higher than what that chart shows... by a lot. Very misleading chart.”
RIM has the biggest market share in units, not in web browsing.
No, Joe, they are not "Apple's figures," they are NetApplications figures. A much more reliable organization than Google's captive and biased (and lying) admob source. Their figures are so out of reality they must be deliberately cooking their books.
NetApplications has no dog in the fight... and their figures are not cooked to push Android or to distort Android's 6.15% presence or usage on the web... which is more akin to their proportional numbers to the iPhone/iTouch numbers. It's not doing badly... but it's not, by any stretch of the imagination, except in a hype, going to exceed the iPhone's usage or even catch up.March 2. 2010 — Heh. Internet Explorer, for reasons unfathomable to any modern web designer, still rules the desktop with a massive, if waning browser share. In the mobile space, however, things they are a different. Net Applications (via CNet) is reporting that the iPhone owns 66.61% share, which compare to Java2ME (RIM’s OS) 9.06% and WinPho’s 6.91%, Android and Symbian’s 6.15% each, and Palm’s 2.37% and the assorted others’ at 2.75%.
No doubt rivals will gain share as the overall market increases, and new products like the Palm Pre hit. What’s interesting, however, is that the WebKit engine beneath Safari is also powering Android’s Chome Lite and will also be powering the Palm Pre, making WebKit’s share of the market extra impressive…
It should also be noted that, when looking at these numbers, even with 16+ million iPhones on the market, the sheer usability of Mobile Safari has to be factored in. Simply put, on many platforms the browsers are still crippled from a rendering standpoint, and frustrating from a interaction standpoint. Make it usable and people will use it, who’d a thunk it?
No doubt other platforms will be addressing this in future updates… but will it be enough to catch Apple’s lead?
As it turns out, Admob is NOT owned by Google. Google has made an offer to buy Admob, and indications are that the DOJ is set to block it.
CNET:
“Google put on a rosy face Thursday. “This is more evidence of how quickly mobile advertising is evolving and growing,” it said in a statement primarily intended for the Federal Trade Commission lawyers potentially gearing up to block its $750 million acquisition of AdMob”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20002079-265.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1
And Admob’s reputation is every bit as good as that of NetApplications(if not better). It could be argued that Admob's figures are better, given that Admob actually deals with monetizing the advertising market on mobile devices (the actual money that comes from various mobile platforms) and therefore know what they are talking about.
In addition, given that Comscore, the biggest and most reputable company in the country for measuring web traffic and market shares, has Android more than doubling their market share in just 3 months, with RIM market share up 2%, even as Apple's market share went down. That makes it two independent companies that have Android gaining fast on the iPhone as compared to just one(NetAplications) that has the iPhone with such high figures. In addition, of course RIM is far ahead of the iPhone in actual unit sales, according to market share figures from practically everyone.
Comscore:
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20100405/a-growth-spurt-for-androids-market-share/?mod=fox
Going by both Admob and Comscore's figures and trends, Android would have overtaken the iPhone in market share long before the end of this year, in both web market share(Admob), and units sold per month(Comscore). It will be interesting to see Comscore's marke share figures for March(which measure actual sales not just web browsing), when Comscore's March figures come out. With superb Android smart phones like the HTC Desire just hitting the market, Apple's market share has nowhere to go but down in the face of the Android Juggernaut.
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