Flash on the iPhone?… Probably Not
February 14, 2008 – 11:43 amThere’s a reason that they call them rumors. The other day, a lot of sources (including Just Browsing) were pointing to a Gear Live article claiming that Flash support for the iPhone web browser is just around the corner. Ryan Stewart, who works for Adobe, doesn’t rule out the possibility but says on his blog that “I assume someone at the high levels of Adobe knows what the status is but I don’t and everyone I talk to doesn’t.” An excellent write-up on iPhone Atlas (the only worthwhile iPhone blog I’ve found) makes a strong case that technical issues really are the biggest barrier, despite reports to the contrary. The article also points out that Flash Lite isn’t really intended to be a version of Flash for mobile devices but rather a tool for developers creating custom mobile interfaces. The author concludes:
Our guess? If Apple does implement Flash support on the iPhone, it will be extremely limited — perhaps only including the ability to playback embedded Flash videos encoded in the H.264 format within MobileSafari but aggressively restricting the types of content that will load (there’s already a bookmarklet dubbed iTransmogrify! that will launch embedded YouTube content in the iPhone’s native YouTube player). Interactivity and full support for sites displayed with Flash simply don’t make sense on the current iPhone generation.
This is easy to believe in light of the poor JavaScript performance of Mobile Safari. We might have to wait for the next generation of hardware to get full-blown Flash support. There is a silver lining however: I care less about having Flash on my iPhone since Scrabulous has been forced to shut down.
Update: A reader points out that Scrabulous is still running. I assumed that it had been taken down in response to the cease-and-desist letter that Hasbro sent to its developers, but apparently not. Sorry, I should have checked my facts. Oh, and Scrabulous developers, thanks a lot. You ruined my punchline!
6 Responses to “Flash on the iPhone?… Probably Not”
Scrabulous still works for me.
By G on Feb 14, 2008
Thanks for the heads up, I fixed the post.
By Matt on Feb 14, 2008
This is just a highly improbable wildcard, but we really don’t know how far along Adobe is with Tamarin-Tracing. Don’t know how much of a difference it would make:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine/browse_thread/thread/e10d25db3dcb28cf#841d6253dcf2de12
By enefekt on Feb 14, 2008
Interesting point. I can’t believe they’ll be ready to roll this out this month, but it isn’t entirely unimaginable that Tamarin, with its just-in-time compilation, will eventually give Flash the boost in needs to run on mobile devices with limited processor power.
By Matt on Feb 14, 2008
I assume there’s already a “Flash for iPhone” sitting in a lab somewhere. It wouldn’t be surprising at all; it already runs on the N800 (ARM based, like iPhone), and there’s obviously already an OS X version.
I suspect, though, that Apple doesn’t want to release it until it meets their user experience and performance requirements. The problem is already evident on the N800 — a significant amount of Flash is heavy on processor usage, and assume PCisms (eg, any Flash game that you control with the keyboard). I think I’d prefer to at least have the choice of using it or not, though.
By Justin Dolske on Feb 14, 2008