Monday 04 January, 2010
Why Apple is doing a good job not allowing the Flash Player to be on the iPhone
I’m going to get shot down for this. I can already feel the finger on the trigger of the sniper on the roof across the street, aiming at my head… I love Flash, I have been playing and creating with Flash ever since I was 17 years old. But…
In the past 2 years there have been numerous times when people expected (and were insanely excited about) a full in-browser Flash Player on the iPhone and while I was one of the people hoping it would happen only a few months ago, I’m not so certain anymore.
Everybody is saying that once Flash Player 10.1 will run in the browser on the iPhone, you will be enabled to have a ‘full web browsing’ experience. But how do you expect the ‘full experience’ on a mobile device (in this case the iPhone)?
Do you remember the insane intro’s without a ‘skip intro’ button?
Do you know about blogs embedding autoplay-enabled videos from Youtube and siblings?
Haven’t you ever run into sites starting to play annoying jingles in the background?
Don’t you ever think about battery usage (read: battery-mass-destruction) due to the countless (and sometimes intense) ENTER_FRAME events that will most likely look like a slideshow, rather than a slick animation?
Have you heard about the thing they call Papervision3D?
Ever considered screen-size and proportions (Just read this post concerning screen-sizes on different devices by Aral Balkan)?
Seriously: all that on a little device, serving the web from a (rather) slow (and to most of us limited) 3G connection that handles itself like a Pentium 3 on speedballs… Personally: I’m not looking forward to it at this point.
I do look forward to being able to compile IPA files from the Flash IDE. And not because I’d be able to create Flash Applications on the iPhone, but because I can create applications on the iPhone. The fact that I can create it in Flash only is appealing to me because at this point I just don’t have the time to get my head around Objective-C yet, and that is a completely different topic!
There, I’ve said it.
OOEHHHHH i hear the clicks to! i agree with your opinion, although I would not say flash on the iphone is NOT good. I think it would increase the mobile web experience a lot. Of course that’s not the same as a full web experience ( hell no ) but that’s a different topic. I also like creating apps in cs5 en have them distrubuted on the iphone and hopefully other smartphones as well, using as3 skills
ps: happy new year and the best of luck in 2010!
a lot of that ranting is just developers abusing a technology, but i can agree on most points
Hazah! Finally someone with the guts to say it!
This sums up the talk we had last saturday, doesn’t it. And as you know I completely agree. I even told you this last year, followed by a heavy discussion… Looks like I won;)
I can’t remember last year’s talk. I do remember saturday’s talk, and indeed: It was about (read: exactly) the same as we said then. I just figured I needed to get this out there, and see what others have to say about this
As a Mac hater I bought what was the next best thing a few months ago, the Nokia N97. It does offer that so called ‘full browsing experience’, supporting Flash 8 and lower. This is, like you suspect, NOT a very large improvement. It makes websites with banners a lot slower and the browser unstable.
I have not visited anything online that made me happy to have Flash. The only (slightly) fun thing has been to that I am able to develop some simple stuff to run offline. But anything more than a basic soundboard is usually too laggy to be any fun. So mobile Flash, sure, but only if you have the mobile CPU power to actually support it…
The main problem is not just the slow 3G connection, it’s the fact that Adobe Flash uses too much memory, more than any mobile device can handle. Therefore apple will never have flash on it’s iphone, not as long as Adobe fixes the memory issues.
Anyway, that said, I always found it a bit sad that apps couldn’t be build with flash, but since there is a solution with the CS5 I think we might be seeing a lot of flash-ported apps. (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html)
If sites are made in Flash for the iPhone by the right people, it should be fine.
But i agree that you dont wanna watch 2Advanced on your iPhone, while riding your bicycle…