“Just about a year ago I wrote a post here at ITworld titled Flash on iPad wouldn’t solve anything (but would strengthen Adobe’s control of the web),” Peter Smith reports for ITworld.
“Back then the iPad 1 was brand new and Apple and Steve Jobs were catching a lot of flak for not allowing Flash on the device,” Smith reports. “My argument was that having Flash on the iPad wouldn’t matter for anything but video since most Flash apps expect mouse and keyboard input anyway. Further, not having Flash on the iPad could encourage websites to offer video via HTML5.”
Smith reports, “Flash on this [Acer Iconia A500 Android] tablet is a dog. It struggles to run high def Flash video and can’t smoothly scroll a game as simple as Farmville. The tablet is no slouch in terms of performance otherwise, so I’m laying the blame here at Adobe’s feet. Presumably Adobe can fix this as it continues to optimize Flash for the Tegra 2 (and other tablet) chipsets, but for now the combination of dual-core tablets and Android Honeycomb 3.0 just doesn’t have the horsepower to run Flash well… In my opinion, having Flash available on my Android tablet adds very little to the value of the device.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Study: iOS users view 80% of mobile video – May 23, 2011
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was right about Adobe’s Flash – May 2, 2011
Adobe capitulates on Flash, adopts Apple’s HTTP Live Streaming for iOS – April 16, 2011
Firefox VP: Adobe Flash is doomed – March 11, 2011
Steve Jobs posts rare open letter: Thoughts on Flash – April 29, 2010
But the fool keeps using an Android device. He deserves what he gets.
Not only that, he plays Farmville on it.
Not having it on my iPad adds a lot of value to it.
“Flash on this Android tablet is a dog.”
Actually, I find this analogue to be lame, since dogs are not bad.
…and with the recent news that 80% of all mobile video is streaming to iOS devices, this only reinforces that flash is NOT NECESSARY to have a great experience.
Flash wasn’t designed to handle touch input. In most cases, it requires a mouse. The iPad has been out for 2 years, and the iOS device longer still. Adobe has had plenty of time to figure this out, but they still haven’t provided a workable mobile version of Flash – for ANY platform. All these reviews of Flash on Android only serve to make Apple’s point. Flash isn’t suited to the mobile space in it’s current form. Can Adobe get it to work? They’ve had nearly 3 years, so I think we have our answer.
On top of that, video has been part of the Internet experience for over 15 years. It’s beyond time to add better video controls into the HTML spec.
The iPad has only been out for one year and two months not two years
Duh
I’m not much of a game player, but one look at the App store will tell you there are plenty of games available for download that don’t require Flash.
That crazy Apple bashing, Adobe Flash developer lady comments on this post and links to her blog in 3…..2……1…..
The problem is that the Adobe development cycles are sooo sloooww for updates. By tthe time they get a Flash update out the next version of the software has already been released.
DERSS, I presume you mean analogy? Don’t think even Android tabs are analogue… that’s Microsoft’s province.
Don’t you get it? Flash is dead, dead, dead. Now move on already and get an iPad.
I find it odd that there are just as many articles and Android fans saying that Flash works perfectly fine with Android. So who is telling the truth? I see video examples that FLASH runs fine on these Androids POS devices…. Truth please.
Most of the “Android fans” saying that Flash works perfectly fine with Android are probably Google’s viral marketers, Adobe’s viral marketers, or both.
Because stuff like this just doesn’t leave any room for debate:
“Assuming we can get performance taken care of, the next problem is input. As I tested various games I’d run into problems as seemingly simple as a help screen that ended with “Press [Space] to continue….” and I couldn’t find a way to invoke the Android virtual keyboard to get access to the space bar, nor would any kind of tapping get me past it. Lots of games use keystrokes to move characters and those of course won’t work either. “
and
“Even games that were built around point and click proved problematic at times. Clicking by tapping mostly worked fine, but when a game wanted me to hold the mouse button down and drag (to pan around a map, for instance) I’d be in trouble again. “
There’s no magical handset or tablet that can solve the user interface problems Flash has on a mobile device, unless it has a slideout keyboard and a pointing device. If anybody says it works perfectly fine with their Android gadget, then either they’re just plain lying, or they’ve got a really small scope and think Flash in its entirety = Youtube or something, or their “phone/tablet” is actually some kind of netbook-esque monstrosity with keyboard and mouse input.
BTW, I just gotta laugh at poor Peter Smith’s hope that Adobe can presumably fix Flash’s awful performance. Why do you think it performs awfully to begin with!?
“… but for now the combination of dual-core tablets and Android Honeycomb 3.0 just doesn’t have the horsepower to run Flash well…”
I find even on my 2008 iMac (2.4 GHz Core 2 Du w/ 3 GB RAM) runs slow if I’ve been doing a lot of browsing, whether with Safari or with Chrome. Yesterday I found that Shockwave Flash was consuming over 70% of my CPU resources.
I still can’t get over the continued lazy reporting about Flash and iOS. It wasn’t so much that Apple and Jobs wouldn’t allow it on iOS devices, it’s that it didn’t — and doesn’t — work reliably and securely. Despite iOS devices first being released in 2007, Adobe STILL has not been able to optimize it to run *properly* on an iPhone or iPad.
Read this EXCELLENT breakdown of Steve Jobs open letter “Thoughts on Flash”: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/steve-jobs-adobes-flash-has-major-technical-drawbacks/8179
Not only are flash videos not viewable on websites supporting this video format without flash-enabled devices like iPhone and iPad, but more troubling is that numerous webpages that run beautiful flash animation are rendered boringly one-demensional with the iPhone/iPad. It’s the dumbing-down of complex, creatively designed, multidimensional animated webpages where Apple’s restrictive anti-flash bias becomes most apparent. The internet is greatly diminished in scope when one attempts to access it with a compromised device such as an iPad.
You are so obtuse.