Adobe’s Flash Player is on 98 percent of all desktop computers, but it is still struggling to make the jump to mobile phones. If you want Flash on a mobile device, right now you have to settle for a compromised version: Flash Lite. But Adobe is committed to bring the full Flash Player experience to mobile phones, as evidenced by its Open Screen Project. On Monday, at its Adobe MAX developer conference, it will demonstrate Flash Player 10 running on a Windows Mobile phone. (However, Flash won’t actually ship on Windows Mobile until late next year). Product manager Michele Turner tells me:
We will be showing the first delivery of Flash on mobile phones, on other platforms. You will see it on Windows Mobile.
Microsoft, if you recall, was also early to adopt Flash Lite for Windows Mobile, despite its parallel development of Flash-competitor Silverlight. So it’s not too surprising that it would be the first to run Flash 10 on Windows Mobile. Turner also indicates that an “Android port” is coming. (Update: In fact, it looks like the Android port is well underway. During today’s announcement, a demo of Flash running on the G1 was shown.)
But what about the iPhone, which famously doesn’t use Flash? (Although there’s been some talk of that happening). Turner will only say:
We are working on Flash on the iPhone, but it is really up to Apple
One of Apple’s objections to Flash is that it is a CPU hog and is not optimized for the ARM11 processors that power the iPhone. In what seems to be an effort to address that concern, Adobe will also be announcing a closer collaboration with ARM to accelerate the adoption of both Flash Player 10 and Adobe AIR on ARM-powered devices.
Once that collaboration bears fruit, maybe we’ll finally see Flash on the iPhone. But I’d be willing to bet my iPhone that we’ll see it on Android phones first.
Flash on Windows Mobile may be a game changer that Microsoft needs. So far they’ve been stack in the stone age.
So Apple’s complaint is that Adobe’s long-standard software that is on 98% of computers isn’t optimized for the processor that Apple themselves chose for their phone?
Apple’s complaint is that they don’t want other peoples’ languages on their locked-down phone. If we could develop for the iPhone with Flash, many fewer people would use the App Store.
Really, Flash ought to be available as something like AIR for standalone apps and enabled on a page-by-page basis for the web. There are too many people who unnecessarily use wmode or otherwise abuse users’ machines with Flash to have it default to on for every page. Even heavy JS crashes mobile Safari. At the same time, if I want to see a Flash page, I ought to be able to.
Where are the browser add-ons for mobile??? I need no-script for mobile safari ( i cant find it on Cydia, but I will donate $100 to get this) and falsh would double my contribution. Not that I don’t welcome it.
Using MS to encourage Apple is great; maybe balckberry next?
Still some room for feature differentiation in mobile as long as Apple resists.
Flash is a terrible CPU hog on OS X – not the processor. Adobe have never bothered to improve it.
no, you’re fucking retarded. Flash hogs on all operating systems, it is the processor.
It’s not really an issue of Flash player runtime. It’s about developers optimizing their codes rather than rush to develop and port on the net. There are hundreds ways to reduce CPU consumption in flash apps but majority of flash developers are just designers who got into the train cos the learning curve is so fast, so very few actually understand Actionscript or will take the time to reduce framerate when there’s less user interaction or write intelligent loops. Flash player is good. developers / designers need to go beyond drag and drop animations. This same thing is happening when you look at Silverlight. I recently checked it up and whao, what a technology! even more advanced than flash in some aspects but hey, the apps I sampled hiked my CPU!
Skyfire as a browser has really helped, streaming all of the flash websites- by far exceeding the iphone’s capabilities. The real drawback to microsoft hsa been the lack of push for a centralized “app store”… Otherwise, the tools available on Windows mobile are pretty good. As far as UI goes…
This is one thing that I would say Silverlight 2 and Flash tie on. Silverlight 2 RTW is going to support the FULL API on Mobile devices (Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android…also heard BlackBerry OS, but not sure). This was demoed at the PDC a couple weeks ago.
I am sure this is where Flash is headed…this way you have one API for the RIA and don’t have to use the “Lite” version. Adobe is a little ahead of the game where they have Flash Lite, but that itself is limited.
Flash could be a game changer for the Android phones, but the android needs to be on better phones..
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Why doesn’t Adobe just provide an SDK to create iPhone apps for the App Store that can embed Flash directly? It could be like AIR but instead of having one shared AIR runtime, each app would need to embed it’s own copy of the runtime. Does Apple really care what technology is used to create an App Store app as long as it is confined within the app itself?
Sure it will be on Android powered phones first… Highly unlikely it will ever make it onto an iPhone for obvious reasons. Apple doesn’t want to, if they did… It would of already been developed to be compatible a year ago.
Best,
Mike
http://www.wannadevelop.com/
I still can’t believe with the technology available today that we’re struggling to get flash on mobile devices. Surely it can’t be that difficult?
It isn’t difficult; it’s undesired. By Apple. Explained here:
The new UI wars: Why there’s no Flash on iPhone 2.0
http://counternotions.com/2008/06/17/flash-iphone/
and here:
Runtime wars (2): Apple’s answer to Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX
http://counternotions.com/category/flashflex/
Flash for the Windows Mobile has been there since 2005 ( Flash Player 7.atleast that’s when i started using it for my Pocket Pc running on Windows Mobile 2003). Can view flash content on it (not flv or youtube like sites)
I think Kontra has the better explanation(s). I do think that some part of not having flash on the iphone is for people to get on the bandwagon for developing apps for the iphone. If you were to compare an iphone app with a flash web app, the two can have really different experiences. I really just think Apple is waiting for some saturation in 3rd party developers to get used to the Apple way.
Judging from the features implemented in Webkit over the last year Apple seems to be throwing their weight behind HTML5 video and SVG as alternatives to Flash. I hope they succeed. The web should be built on open standards. If Flash is allowed to dominate video and animation it will allow Adobe to chose who gets the “full” internet. Just ask any 64-bit Linux user…
Funny you mention 64-bit Linux, since one of the other big announcements at Max was Adobe is releasing a beta of the 64-bit Linux Flash Player. See here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/11/64-bits.html
Also notice that most of the work was in porting the Flash VM, which is open sourced and unfortunately got zero contributions from the open source community. It’s part of the Tarmain projecting, meaning it wouldn’t just help Adobe, but also help Mozilla with their 64-bit JavaScript engine for Firefox.
I have been running Flash on 64-bit ubuntu for over a year.
So who is responsible for still no flash suppurt on iPhone? Adobe or Apple? When all these platform wars will end?
I think that Flash Lite application will run pretty hard on a mobile phone. Adobe applications to load even quite hard even on a computer.
Have a look on xda-developers.com flash 9/10 (or Flash Mobile 3 as it’s called) i already available for Windows Mobile and Opera 9.xxx. Work a treat and even things like iPlayer from the BBC work.
If you want it now, get a Windows Mobile 6.x phone, it’s not gonna make it to the iPhone, at least not one that’s un-JailBroken.
Well Windows isn’t the first to have full blown out flash on a mobile device, my Nokia N95 with the most updated symbian software has been doing it just fine.. loads up youtube videos/flash websites great! Though if you try it with a long flash video like on MegaVideo it forces quit on the browser
Well Windows isn’t the first to have full blown out flash on a mobile device, my Nokia N95 with the most updated symbian software has been doing it just fine.. loads up youtube videos/flash websites great! Though if you try it with a long flash video like on MegaVideo it forces quit on the browser.
Flash works pretty well on my Nokia E71. It’s not Adobe’s fault that Apple won’t let them on the iPhone. It’s all about standards and dominating them.
For example Apple made YouTube convert all their content so people can get YouTube on the iPhone. Imagine that, 2 identical copies of the same content, and also the original data. ;-)
And according to Adobe, Apple’s claim that Flash drains the battery has been fixed. But if Apple allows them on the iPhone that would probably mean opening the door for Air as well.
Not too many companies are happy with Adobe’s domination when it comes to web video currently.
I really only want to be able to watch Flash video. The rest I don’t care about and certainly don’t want to load sites on my G1 and have it sweat over worthless Flash ads. I hope that on Android at least, Flash content would be off by default and require a finger press for activation. If I can’t control what it will show I’d rather not have it altogether.
Flash video became popular because it was ubiquitous across platforms. It may not be anymore.
In the priority of Google mobile which will launch Adobe Flash for Windows mobile. However, iPhone will consider to adopt or not because it has already reject mini opera.
Thanks
http://mobilesinuk.blogspot.com/
please, will someone from the inside give us a relaistic date of when flash will be on the g1, thanks, sky cards