wired.com
"We tested different websites with the Flash 10.1 Player on a Nexus One running Android 2.2 and here’s our first take: With Flash on your phone, no website is really out of bounds. Flash does not appear to be a battery hog, nor does it chew away at your phone’s resources.
But it’s not a flawless experience either."
Weird. It's like Steve Jobs wasn't telling the entire truth, or something.
Understandable why Flash might be excluded. This level of performance is "acceptable" for most of the industry but not up to the seamless level Apple strives for.
That level of performance is acceptable for Apple.
More importantly, this demonstrates that Flash doesn't kill battery life as propose by Jobs. 5 hours of heavy web usage of heavy flash sites doesn't sound unreasonable.
There should be different expectations for mobile use. 3G use is already a drain, and you're asking to add another drain on top of that.
The question to ask, is how would Flash over 3G do? If we're down to just a few hours of battery life, it doesn't sound attractive anymore.
Apple's contention was that Flash would destroy mobile batteries. This is clearly not the case.
Look at it this way: With Flash, the battery life is 5 hours. With 3G, the battery life is 5 hours. Yes, on 3G, the battery life might be worse, considering you are using both 3G and Flash.
But then, where do you draw the line? If 5 hours is acceptable battery life for 3G, if I don't have 3G, could I have Flash and get the same battery life?
Finally, that's 5 hours of 3G browsing the internet. Is that 5 hours of streaming video content? I don't know, the website doesn't say. However, the Wired article makes remarks this is party what he was doing, streaming flash videos over a wireless connection.
Hopefully that explains it better. Flash clearly doesn't kill battery life. At least no more than 3G does.
I think Apple's point of view is partly that 3G offers something you couldn't get otherwise, whereas Flash replicates things already available on the iPhone/iPad platform. Therefore, 3G battery life issues are acceptable, where as, for Apple, Flash is not.
And, you can't offer Flash on non-3G variants, because then you know people would want it on the 3G variants.
And keep in mind how much Flash you'll be running "unintentionally" doing just normal browsing (on 3G or not) in the form of ads and the like. Flash doesn't only come into play when you're playing Farmville. So this is something that affects a lot of browsing.
On that note: how does backgrounding work in Flash Player 10.1? Can I play Flash-streamed audio in the background while I browse other pages (via "tabs") or use other apps? If not, that's one more plus for native apps over in-browser Flash. But if so, what happens if I have 5 different pages open, each with a couple of Flash ads -- do they keep executing in the background?
First, yes, 3G does "Kill battery life," but with regard to Jobs and Apple, they made it seem like Flash was something so much worse. While they never compared it to 3G, the sense was that it was a lot worse than it seems to be.
Maybe a better approach is to say Flash doesn't kill battery life anymore than other Apple implementations of other technologies.
As for the rest of your comment, that's more of an implementation thing. Done intelligently, most of what you are talking about is a non-issue. I'll try to explain.
First, Flash doesn't have to run normally. Flash support can be activated. This avoids the torrent of flash ads that can run rampant on websites. However, if I go to a website, and I want to run the application there, I can choose to enable it. Something like this is already done with the YouTube app on the iPhone. You go to a video page, and you click on the Play button, a simple image. In Flash's case, it would explicitly enable the flash player to activate.
People do this already in browser. They block flash for the most part, and enable flash in certain, particular cases.
As for backgrounding v.s. native apps, that's a non-issue. Native apps will always be better, on any platform. The problem is, not every web app can have a native iPhone app.
In your example, the flash web page could be treated like every other web page. In this case, does an HTML5 video continue playing if you open a new tab? Does it keep executing in the background?
The idea isn't to recreate the native functionality, but give Flash support so existing media that exists now can be consumed. Media that HTML5 has no support for, and cannot deal with.
I certainly agree with you that it's not a dealbreaker for Flash in web pages to not be backgroundable. And I'd prefer it to be the case that it's not backgrounded in the general case.
For what it's worth, this is exactly what Adobe should have done from the start instead of wasting their time trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone. Getting Flash to run flawlessly on competing smartphones would have made it far harder to Jobs to claim that Flash wasn't technically up to it.
But Android is the only smartphone in direct competition with the iPhone, and Android only really picked up steam in the past 8 months or so.
Then he said Apple had to approve apps because otherwise very bad things would happen, but with 50000 apps and millions of users, Android showed that's not the case.
Now he says Flash is bad for mobile and Android is once again showing that's not the case.
The best part is, you don't have to care what Jobs says as much anymore. I switched from an iPhone to a Nexus One a few months ago and after watching the Froyo keynote, I have a hard time imagining going back.
I'm not sure that I would call that fixed.
I hope you are right though.
I know from my experience with Flash on Linux that it is insane, Flash eventually consumes 4gb of memory and slows my computer to a halt. I finally just removed the plugin and browse without flash.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenote... (PDF Link)
Also there is a huge number of bug fixes in this release... don't know why they didn't just call it Flash Player 11, it's not really a dot release.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/android-2-2-froyo-beta-ha...
Money quote: "our beloved handset got piping hot after about 30 minutes of heavy video watching, and the battery indicator in the upper right had a sizable dent."
You really can't judge the power/heat of a version w/o HW acceleration.
Do you think the flash games on your site will also be compiled as native apps? If so is there a way to integrate kongregate achievements so I can still gain the points?
At this point we're just doing them through the browser. I don't think 'compiled as native apps' is the right description. They're converted into Air apps, but they're still using the Flash runtime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Integrated_Runtime
Although Flash filled an important need for video when the FLV format was first introduced, it's role as the primary video player for the web will be marginalized over time. However, that will bring the focus of Flash back towards it's roots of vector animation and interactivity at which it does an excellent job.
Interestingly, running flash on phones could pose a threat to Apple's current business model. On the iPhone, music/movies/games all come via the app store. However, flash can deliver all of those directly to the browser - whether for free (youtube), or for a fee (netflicks).
Apples takes 30% of an apps price? Charges for SDK/license (whatever you call it) per year? Has Billions of downloads? And they doon't make much money? Never ever will i believe that.
An interesting read on that, by the way: http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/14/about-those-iphone-app-stor...
Let's look at some numbers!
FTA: "As I surfed a number of Flash-heavy websites, played movie trailers and little video clips on and off for about two hours the battery level on my phone was down to about 61 percent from a fully charged battery"
So, 2 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy websites, at about 20% of battery life per hour. So, that's 5 hours of heavy web usage on flash-heavy websites doing a mix of things.
Compare that to the iPhone:
From the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html Under the Battery life sidebar: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G"
So, the author experienced the same level of battery use as a user would experience on an iPhone 3GS doing a comparable task.
Edit: I should point out that the it appears the Wired author was using an internal network, which, for the iPhone is: "9 hours of Internet use on Wi-Fi". However, I still feel as if this doesn't change the results much.
FTA: "Our corporate Wi-Fi connection just didn’t seem good enough and most Flash-heavy sites took a while to load."
So I assume the testing with Wi-Fi, though again, this isn't completely clear. Even still, I think this demonstrates that mobile flash isn't the harbinger of death that Jobs was making it out to be, and demonstrates that the reaction to Flash is more than just for technical reasons.
The iPhone will still fail the test, considering it can't display flash. =)
Not sure when the release is due though.
It's Flash 10.0, but with the hooks for hardware decoding in Mac OSX (that Apple only added very recently to the plugin API). It's supposed to perform much, much better on Mac OSX for video playback.
But it’s not a flawless experience either. Flash content — especially video — can take up to a minute to load, which is more frustrating on a phone than it is on a desktop. And it sucks bandwidth."
How am I suppose to merge those two statements?