After Apple made it clear that Adobe’s Flash plugin would never be part of its iPhone or iPad, the last big hope for Flash on mobile devices was Google’s Android.
Google and Adobe now had a common rival in Apple and the thought that maybe Flash on Android would be so awesome that Apple would have to break down and let iPhone owners use it.
Doesn’t look like it. In a post for Laptop Magazine, Avram Piltch writes that Flash video on Android is indeed terrible:
“How bad is mobile Flash? When I went to ABC.com and tried to play a clip, I waited five minutes while the player said “loading.” During that time, it was nearly impossible to scroll around the page or tap objects on it. Eventually, I scrolled up to see a message that was previously obstructed and said ”Sorry. An error occurred while attempting to load the video. Please try again later.” It gets worse…
When I visited Fox.com and tried to start an episode of House, the program actually played but, even over Wi-Fi, the playback was slideshow-like. Worse still, the player became unresponsive as it ignored my attempts to tap the pause, volume, and slider buttons. At some point during playback, an overlay message warned me that this video was “not optimized for mobile.” I encountered the same message when I tried to play a trailer of the Expendables that was embedded on the movie’s mySpace page. Wasn’t Flash 10.1 supposed to erase the boundaries between mobile and the desktop?”
Piltch goes on to list some Flash-on-Android experiences that aren’t so bad, but ultimately concedes, “I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right.” (He also tries some Flash games, and discovers that they aren’t meant for playing on Android phones, either.)
Sure, in theory, Adobe, Google, and Android hardware partners could optimize Flash video to get it to a point where it’s watchable on mobile. And to be fair, perhaps this was an isolated bad experience. We haven’t had a chance to try it ourselves.
But in the meantime, many web publishers are already working their way around Flash, installing HTML5 video players onto their sites, so that they’ll work on the iPhone and iPad. Once HTML5 video is universal enough, there really won’t be a need for Flash on mobile devices.
Reprinted with permission from The Business Insider
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