Apple Flash is not supported on any iPod, iPhone and iPad and never will be. I hear lots of people complaining about that for obscure reasons such as can’t play flash games and watch youtube videos bla bla bla. Personally I’m damn glad that Apple decided to ditched Flash support and instead choosing to embrace open technologies such as HTML 5, CSS and javascript.
Steve jobs even took time to write a long post (thoughts on flash) to address this issue with lots of good + valid points here.
Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.
To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.
Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.
Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?
Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
Both Apple and Google are pushing hard with HTML 5, and Microsoft is going to do the same with IE9 while Firefox, Opera and Chrome have already partial support for HTML5. I’ve never ever find the need to design any websites using Flash (lucky me!) but I do reckon it was something cool to know about Macromedia (then acquired by Apple) Flash back in the 90s and early 2000s.
If you’re a flash developer, I understand why these decisions by Apple might upset you. What’s so great about Flash that can’t be achieved using HTML5, CSS and JS? If I were a new web developer starting out today, I would stick with HTML, CSS, JS (framwork ex. jquery), xml, php (frameworks ex. cakephp, zend, symfony), python, .NET, Oracle,MS SQL Server,MySQL (relational databases + sql) since they are technologies/languages that you can bet on that will stay for a long time to come.
As for Flash: Please “roll over”. Your time has come and you’re no more relevant.
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