Adobe Reader or something else

Question

I have tried to be patient and loyal to my Adobe Reader on my Android phone and tablet but now I think I am finaly going start making the break from Adobe Reader to something else. I purchased ezPDF Reader almost a year ago and haven't used it much but have started using it again and am liking what I see. There are more annotation features. I have a PDF document with an emebedded sound file that won't play in Adobe Reader but will in ezPDF Reader. Text reflow, while far from perfect in both readers, is somewhat cleaner in ezPDF Reader than Adobe Reader. There are lots more features and I'm just getting started with my exploration.
It doesn't seem to me that Adobe is very interested in mobile. Case in point is when they got rid of a load of mobile apps and kept just a few with most of the few iOS only. I used to have Adobe Ideas but since I got rid of my iPad Mini I don't have it anymore and now only have Photoshop Touch and Adobe Reader. Is it because PDF is on it's way out or not a viable solution to mobile platforms? In the nearly two years I have had Adobe Reader very few useful improvements have been added or updated to it. There is no mobile prerelease program. There is no noticable way to give feedback or feature requests. If there is something then like a lot of things on the Adobe site you have to really dig to find it. There is this forum but most of the time it's like posting to a black hole and you wonder if any of the developers read it. There is very little feedback.
If Adobe created a paid version of Adobe Reader loaded with great features Adobe is noted for then I would purchase it.
This isn't a total abandonment. I'm still going to keep an eye on Adobe Reader but Adobe you're moving too slow.
A short wish list
JavaScript capability in forms so I can fill out an order form or billing form and totals will be calculated.
More anotation features such as more flexible highlight colors and choices and note icons.
Play embedded sounds and movies.

Answer 1

Truth be told, we have quite a few people working on the Mobile Readers. I'll be honest, it's pretty hard. For many reasons, we can't just directly port the existing desktop product directly to these mobile platforms. They aren't yet powerful enough and the experience with touch is totally different. It's important to remember that we have 20+ years of history developing the desktop product. We've been working on the mobile products 3-4 years. I don't expect that we'll completely catch up anytime soon =).
To answer some of the specific requests on the short list:
* On android, we do have some JavaScript capability. Most specifically, calculation, validation and formatting for forms has some limited support and we're adding to it all the time.
* We've actively avoided adding too many options to the product to make it simpler and make experience better. In fact, some of us think one of the mistakes we added in the desktop product was adding too much. We have an easy way to choose from 8-10 highlight colors and feel like that's enough. We thought a color picker would be overkill. I'm curious how you'd use this. Maybe we are missing your use case in our thinking!
* We don't play embedded videos, sounds and movies, though this is on our backlog and at some point we'd like to get to it. That said, the primary reason we haven't done it is that we're limited by the devices. In many cases, the devices will only play very specific codecs for audio and video. It's simpler to explain to users that "it just doesn't work on mobile" than to try to educate them about audio/video codecs and why it works sometimes and not others. For what it's worth, if you add the audio/video as an attachment AND it's properly encoded in a way that the device can handle it, you can play the audio/video.
Bottom line, we're working on it. I should say though that "Feature Parity" has never been a design goal. We want to add what makes sense rather than blindly moving every feature from the desktop to mobile platforms. Progress is always slower than you/we like, but know that we are working on improving the product.