Flash® 10.1 available for Android 2.2
I linked to a video by PocketNow.com demoing the Flash beta that can be installed on Android. Granted this is still beta software but so far it doesn’t even look worth installing. After watching the comparison video for a couple minutes I think Steve Jobs and Apple are still correct - Flash just isn’t suited for mobile devices - except (maybe) web based Flash games- which anything worth playing has a native version anyhow.
Flash is:
- a memory hog (the device had to be rebooted)
- slow and clunky (watch the scrolling or ad animations). The world’s fastest browser becomes one of the world’s slowest.
- unusable/unwieldy. I loved to see how he started an embedded Youtube video but couldn’t get it to stop and had to navigate away because the button was just too small to hit.
- full of bugs. One page rendered was just all over the place due to the Flash plugin.
- full of ads. seriously, I have flash blocked on my desktop for a reason. I don’t need my mobile device crawling just so I get a slow animation of some corporate logo.
Oh, but you can watch web video embedded in the browser. If you are willing to trade fast and quick with slow and unwieldy just to watch a stupid cat playing a piano or have dozens of ads cluttering up the page then go for it.
Just for the record, it has been three years since the original iPhone launched and even if Apple really wanted Flash® on the device (which they don’t) we still don’t have a usable mobile version three years after the fact. Adobe® really missed the boat. Now that the mobile web is where most growth and profitability lie I don’t see Flash as relevant in a few years time. Goodbye proprietary browser plugins. And good riddance.
