Bye bye Flash on mobile devices

[Essruu]

Android following Apple's lead yet again.

 

Steve Jobs was right all along then... http://t.co/asCNDgy1

[trousers]

Here's hoping the people behind Saints Player are paying attention....

[pedg]

Real reason why there was never flash on apple devices was that it would allow people to play games without apple getting their 20% cut.

[Baj]

Real reason why there was never flash on apple devices was that it would allow people to play games without apple getting their 20% cut.

And nothing whatsoever to do with battery consumption and it being an outdated technology. HTML 5 was developed to stamp out all the extra installs browsers require to run additional content, like flash. Whatever your thoughts on Apple not adopting Flash, it was the right decision and I'm glad Android have followed them

[pedg]

And nothing whatsoever to do with battery consumption and it being an outdated technology. HTML 5 was developed to stamp out all the extra installs browsers require to run additional content, like flash. Whatever your thoughts on Apple not adopting Flash, it was the right decision and I'm glad Android have followed them

 

At the time ios started there was really no such thing as usable HTML5. In my opinion the decision not to have flash on ios was mainly commercial not technical. As I remember just as adobe were about to release a version of flash for ios apple decided to add a rule for apps that banned interpreted code which stopped the release of the flash player.

[pap]

At the time ios started there was really no such thing as usable HTML5. In my opinion the decision not to have flash on ios was mainly commercial not technical. As I remember just as adobe were about to release a version of flash for ios apple decided to add a rule for apps that banned interpreted code which stopped the release of the flash player.

 

I'd agree with this. Apple pulling Flash from iOS was more to do with the suite of tools that Adobe were releasing at the time. In amongst the feature set was something which would allow Flash stuff to be compiled into iPhone apps. Apple were not happy with that.

 

As something of a technical purist myself ( I'm not a fan of virtual machines, for example ) I can see the technical reasons for not wanting to allow apps falling under this umbrella. Native code always beats out an abstraction like Flash. Issues with Flash may have even undermined confidence in Apple's products ( i.e. bad Flash upgrade = your iPhone looks crap ). Most of us have had enough experience with Flash to know that the apps running on it don't always function as they should in all environments.

 

I'm not saying that there weren't commercial considerations. If you're developing on iOS doing anything other than pure HTML5 dev, you basically have to have a Mac and an Apple developer's licence. If you're a consumer, all those Flash games on Kongregate, etc - are no good for you. You'll need to hunt down the iOS version (if it exists). So yep, some definite commercial consideration going on.

 

That all said, I've never been a massive fan of Flash. It's a reaction to the limitations of the browsers of the day. One of the worst things that anyone can do, web-wise, is do an all Flash site. There is literally nothing for Google to spider.

[pedg]

Problem for flash is that though it has improved over the years (actionscript 3 is a half decent OO language, much more hardware acceleration added to reduce cpu usage, flex system for simplifying creating online forms, etc) it has carried this reputation for being buggy and power hungry in the same way some people thing windows PC go to BSOD on a daily basis. In the mobile space there had been advanced to allow access to sensor data such as the accelerometer and if apple had allowed flash I am fairly sure it would have been a popular choice for building crossplatform apps but without apple it was just another way of building apps for android and never really took off.