Five Months Later: Flash in the Mobile Space.
Well, here I am again, comparing Apples to oranges. It’s been about five months since the iPad came out in the US and about a month since the iPhone 4 and iOS 4.0.
What is the current state of affairs where everyone’s favorite hotly contested plugin is concerned?
Well, Flash 10.1 is out for many Android devices, unfortunately it doesn’t work particularly well, through a combination of developers not optimizing their code properly and the plugin itself having a degree of instability. Crashes are common, as are glitches with asset loading, particularly where video sites are concerned. Games that haven’t been designed for touchscreens won’t work at all. This was one of Adobe’s few remaining chances to show that Flash can be relevant in the mobile space, but it’s clearly not going so well for them.
This really isn’t anything new. Flash has been bloated and terrible for years and Adobe has become lazy and complacent in their role at the top. They’ve become the Microsoft of the creative space and it really shows.
Meanwhile, 4.5 million+ iPads and who knows how many iPhones later, the world is deciding with their wallets. iOS devices currently hold 55% of mobile browsing. Considering the number of other mobile operating systems out there, that is a titanic supermajority.
That number will only continue to increase with new niche devices such as the new Apple TV. In fact, iOS is on track to displace OS X as Apple’s most prolific operating system, and that’s clearly part of the plan as I’ve said before. One operating system under Jobs, with closed App Store and iTunes downloads for all.
HTML5 still has flaws and limitations, that much is clear. But on a closed mobile system, many of those limitations are negated. Fonts can’t be saved, videos can’t be downloaded. DRM protection is simply unnecessary. As for advanced playback, iOS loads HTML5 video into its mobile blend of QuickTime Player. No fuss, no mess.
So where does this leave Flash? Right where it started, a useful tool for desktop browsing but nothing more than a toy for mobile. What Adobe has failed to realize is that after three years of inaction and failure with Flash, HTML5 is good enough for mobile devices. Apple purposefully integrated HTML5 into iOS from the beginning for this very reason, and thus, a large majority of mobile users are capable of enjoying multimedia content without Flash.
Five Months Later: Flash in the Mobile Space.
Well, here I am again, comparing Apples to oranges. It’s been about five months since the iPad came out in the US and about a month since the iPhone 4 and iOS 4.0.
What is the current state of affairs where everyone’s favorite hotly contested plugin is concerned?
Well, Flash 10.1 is out for many Android devices, unfortunately it doesn’t work particularly well, through a combination of developers not optimizing their code properly and the plugin itself having a degree of instability. Crashes are common, as are glitches with asset loading, particularly where video sites are concerned. Games that haven’t been designed for touchscreens won’t work at all. This was one of Adobe’s few remaining chances to show that Flash can be relevant in the mobile space, but it’s clearly not going so well for them.
This really isn’t anything new. Flash has been bloated and terrible for years and Adobe has become lazy and complacent in their role at the top. They’ve become the Microsoft of the creative space and it really shows.
Meanwhile, 4.5 million+ iPads and who knows how many iPhones later, the world is deciding with their wallets. iOS devices currently hold 55% of mobile browsing. Considering the number of other mobile operating systems out there, that is a titanic supermajority.
That number will only continue to increase with new niche devices such as the new Apple TV. In fact, iOS is on track to displace OS X as Apple’s most prolific operating system, and that’s clearly part of the plan as I’ve said before. One operating system under Jobs, with closed App Store and iTunes downloads for all.
HTML5 still has flaws and limitations, that much is clear. But on a closed mobile system, many of those limitations are negated. Fonts can’t be saved, videos can’t be downloaded. DRM protection is simply unnecessary. As for advanced playback, iOS loads HTML5 video into its mobile blend of QuickTime Player. No fuss, no mess.
So where does this leave Flash? Right where it started, a useful tool for desktop browsing but nothing more than a toy for mobile. What Adobe has failed to realize is that after three years of inaction and failure with Flash, HTML5 is good enough for mobile devices. Apple purposefully integrated HTML5 into iOS from the beginning for this very reason, and thus, a large majority of mobile users are capable of enjoying multimedia content without Flash.
Posted 1 year ago
