Average Flash Performance on iPad and iPhone Competitors

By dag | August 21, 2010 | 5 comments

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A couple days ago, the online magazine LAPTOP evaluated the performance of Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 on various mobile devices, with a special focus on how the multimedia player handles various content sources on the new Droid 2, a device very comparable to the iPad or the iPhone4 when it comes to raw processing power, as well as the HTC EVO 4G.

Was Steve Jobs right to say that Flash is simply not designed to run well on a mobile platform? According to Avram Piltch, the author of the article ‘I’m the last person on earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that “Flash has had its day.” I took it as nothing more than showmanship when Jobs shared his thoughts on Flash and wrote that “Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices.” After spending time playing with Flash Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2, the first Android 2.2 phone to come with the player pre-installed, I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.‘

While the player does work, its performance is good only with mobile optimized sites such as Sony.com, and is sub-par with traditional Flash content, with jerky videos and unresponsive commands on Flash-intensive websites such as ABC.com or FOX.com. In other words, in order to get Flash to work on mobile devices, content providers need to re-work and optimize their content, which defeats Flash’s main selling point: Flash apps are meant to be fully playable regardless of the platform they are running on. As MacRumors puts it, “If you’re modifying your videos anyway, why not go the full monty and use an HTML 5 player instead of Flash?”.

Other issues arise with content like games, as Flash was never built with touch input in mind, or even with websites, due to incompatibilities between the mobile Flash player and the Flash content some sites like The New York Times use.

While we appreciate the fact that Adobe is working hard at porting its framework to mobile devices, the experience still seems to be sub-par, and far from what is available on full blown PCs or Macs. In other words, Steve Jobs’ point that Flash is not viable for mobile devices like the iPad or the iPhone is still valid today. Meanwhile, instead of recompiling their content to work with the mobile version of Flash, more and more websites choose to move to other, universal alternatives such as HTML5, which may ultimately render Adobe’s efforts more and more irrelevant.

About dag: Certified geek

Droid does, adobe doesn’t

Flash is so yesterday…
Thibault

I think it’s important to point out that Steve Jobs communicated with the folks at Adobe asking them to make a workable mobile version of Flash player. He waited and waited for the mobile Flash player to congeal and the player kept being delayed. What would one ask Steve Jobs to do? Keep waiting? No, he had to move on, and move forward he did.

The result is that due to Adobe’s inaction, iPad and iPod touch don’t have Flash and Flash Mobile on the other devices and subpar. Adobe cries foul, saying that Steve’s decision not to include Flash is indicative of Steve trying to prevent other third party from playing in their so-called “Wall garden”. Well, the facts don’t read like so. It was Adobe who did not respond soon enough and when they were finally pushed by the market to respond, they lied.

I don’t know anything about Flash technology, but let’s say all things being equal, it is conceivable that Adobe respond earlier with an up-to-par Flash player early on in the game. Now, their own delay results in them having to confront a market (at least a segment of the market) shifting to HTML5. They really did bring this on to themselves.

Now, if it is true that Flash technology, because of what it is, could not ever have been made useable for mobile touch devices, then Adobe should have shifted direction towards making players and content development tool to HTML5.

Is this a case of Adobe not willing to let go of technology they have invested in which they try to force to work in new situations (à la forcing square peg into round hole) when they should have cut their losses and build tools and players for HTML5? It’s possible. Time will tell.

Walt French

“…it is conceivable that Adobe respond earlier with an up-to-par Flash player early on in the game.”

Well, not to me. There’ve been smartphones for over a decade now, and still not decent Flash on a single one of them. Heck, nothing even resembling decent Flash except for testing how fast the EVO burns thru batteries.

If (a) Adobe actually cared about putting Flash on phones, AND (b) Adobe knew how, it’d have been done years ago.

Next time you are on your Mac, fire up your Activity Manager and click thru your Flash blocker. When I did it recently, it showed MORE RAM and MORE CPU in use by the Flash player plugin, than most smartphones phones even HAVE. (If you can turn off your Graphics chip, you’ll see it get even worse.) This is just not a technology that fits into 2010 phones. Never could’ve been one when Apple intro’d the iPhone.

Yes, Adobe COULD have some magic tricks to tune Flash for the dozens of different phones that it somehow can’t actually implement, but this example certainly suggests that we need another iteration or two of Moore’s Law before Flash will perform decently on the little gizmos we call smartphones.

And yet we still see sites touting “support” for Flash, as if somehow letting Adobe crash our phones is a service. It’s just more Adobe/Android marketing spin that won’t work as soon as people realize how useless that “support” is without actual, you know, functional “Flash.”

Remember next time you see “support for Flash.” Just regurgitating the spew that the writer swallowed from Adobe/Android Marketing.

Thibault

When the mobile Flash player goes into full screen mode, the message “Press back key to exit full screen mode” comes up. Well, for touch devices without a physical keyboard, that message makes no sense at all! How on earth does one press the “back key” to exit? What “back key”? Where?

Same problem with flash games that say press left-click for this or press right-click for that. Again, can’t be done. There is not “click” action on a touch screen.

This isn’t a problem of Flash content creators. This is a problem of Flash as a structure itself where it is device DEPENDENT. Because Flash is device DEPENDENT, it is NOT a good tool to bridge the differences between devices that use a desktop metaphor (like desktop computers and laptops) and devices that are touchscreen based (e.g., iPod and iPod-like devices, and touchscreen tablet).

This goes to show that Flash is NOT, at this point in the technology world, a good tool to use for websites, if you want to:
a) minimise resources for developing content for different devices
b) want to have content that is easily transferable from one type of platform to another
http://tk-4136.spaces.live.com/ abntroop

I’m just glad someone outside of the apple fanboy club decided to be objective and check to see whether apple is full of it or not. Frankly, I’ve thought Flash is like an anchor, retarding internet progress one site at a time. It had its time in the spotlight, and was good for what it was. Now it’s time to move on to a format that is capable of delivering the internets HD needs. Make way for the future!