Blog | mechdrew

If anything has bugged me more about the iPad announcement than the iPad itself, it would be the constant moaning and groaning from the blogosphere and its commenters (Download Squad article, I’m pointing to the comments section primarily) about the general lack of Adobe’s Flash Player on any iPhone OS device, including the iPhone (duh), iPod touch (I just barely got one of these about a month ago) and the aforementioned iPad. Adobe has been after blood ever since the iPad announcement, and even went so far in their smear campaign to “accidentally” include pornography in one of its screenshots to try to justify the need of Flash on iPhone OS.

Are we being serious, folks? You want Flash, the bane of Internet design and functionality for over a decade, and you want it on your mobile device that badly? Granted, Flash provided features that were not commonly available in most browsers or media players in the beginning, but it has been superseded now by much better browsers and programs (dare I drop the word “apps”?) that perform those functions much faster and much better. And let’s not forget that the primary use for Flash on most websites today are those hideous, annoying advertisements that get in your way, make your page load slower, and require me to use tools like Adblock Plus in both Firefox and Thunderbird (for RSS feeds) just to save my sanity. You’ve got to come up with much better reasons than games and video sites like Hulu to convince me. May I point out a few flaws in this reasoning?

Oh yes, Hulu is fun because you can watch that episode you missed last week (at least for us Americans, so international users have even less reason to want Flash.) It uses Flash as it’s sole means of operating, even when using their dedicated desktop applications (just right-click in the player if you don’t believe me.) “We want Hulu on our iPhones!” say the legions of Flash-worshiping minions. And to be honest, I would love Hulu to be on my iPod touch. But let’s look at the situation here from the correct angle: rather than adapting the delivery system, being Flash, to work on the iPhone, shouldn’t we rather request that Hulu adapt it’s content to function correctly outside of Flash? Copyrights and other issues would need to be considered for sure, but it does not make sense to have a middle-man controlling the content when the iPhone OS is fully capable of decoding video itself. YouTube has been on the iPhone from day one without the need of some arbitrary plugin. No, it does not run inside the browser or in the Facebook app (iTunes link), but it works and it works well.

Pandora is another great website that is unfortunately crippled by Flash. I love creating my own stations and listening to old favorites as well as new discoveries. But in contrast to Hulu, Pandora does not have an equivalent “web radio” feature built natively into the iPhone OS. Luckily Pandora (and its competitor, Last.fm) have released apps for the iPhone OS and even other mobile operating systems like Android and Palm’s webOS that allow a user to listen on the go. If fact, I prefer the mobile app because the advertisements are just as prevalent but less annoying, besides being able to move about the house or workplace. Considering the Pandora Radio app (iTunes link) can usually be found in the Top 100 free apps on the iTunes App Store it appears to be a better solution than waiting for Flash to come to the OS.

The Flash supporters wouldn’t have a leg to stand on if there weren’t a few other points besides media to their argument, so let’s look at the other major complaint: games. Web games were the reason I ever discovered Flash (and its neglected, somewhat forgotten sibling Shockwave) and for a long time I loved playing those games. I don’t have as much time as I used to, but every now and then I like to try out one of Download Squad’s suggested “Time Wasters”. I will concede that I have played a few that I have thought, “Wow, I’d love to play those on my iPod anytime I want!” But think for a moment about your favorite games that use Flash and then think about the control system they use. That’s right, a keyboard and mouse. Not quite what we have in mind on our mobile device.

Before anyone says, “You have a touchscreen, you don’t need a mouse!” or, “There’s a virtual keyboard available,” think back to how you control the games. I have two examples of this huge flaw, and both of them come from Download Squad’s Time Wasters feature. (If anyone knows great, inspiring games, it has to be Download Squad.) The two games are Continuity and Starlight.

Continuity is an amazingly simple but truly fun experience. My description won’t do it justice but you move tiles on the screen which represent your playing environment with the goal of obtaining all the keys to open a door somewhere in one of the tiles; it may sound easy, but it is not. Now, the primary input device is a keyboard. In order to successfully navigate the tiles, you usually need at least two keys pressed at the same time, and the tiles zoom out when you need to rearrange them. Let’s look at how this would work on an iPhone: if the game ever loads with a decent speed, I have to popup the keyboard somehow (not sure how you would do that in Flash considering it comes up for text inputs only) which will take up half of the screen space in either orientation and which currently has no arrow keys. Before taking into account any other issues, that alone would hinder this game from being played. I will concede that the iPad has a keyboard accessory that could provide these functions and not take up screen space, but that is all moot when you consider that there is an iPhone OS version of the game being developed. Funny, I recommended that Hulu create an iPhone OS-specific app before…

Now take a look at Starlight. This game basically is a filed of star rotating on a single point in a 3-D plane. You use the mouse only to rotate the screen. Once the stars are aligned to a certain constellation, usually a famous figure or everyday object, you proceed to the next round. There are no buttons to press or click, so this makes it really impractical on an iPhone. Since Mobile Safari interprets movement as page scrolling, it would never be input into the flash game. And even if it were, the iPhone and iPod touch screen size would make it difficult to play still. If it ever were to be playable on the iPhone OS, we’d either have to make serious changes to the way the OS interprets hand gestures or the game itself would have to be adjusted to use such a setup, thus negating the reasons to not develop an iPhone OS version.

I do understand that not all Flash games require any input besides the click of a mouse (or tap in the case of iPhone OS) but in that case why have it be Flash-based? There are much more intuitive, simpler and OS independent alternatives for such simple games. Until Flash has some legitimate function that can not be easily or, more importantly, better implemented in the OS, there is no point in having it ported to iPhone OS.

Finally, I’m going to repeat a lot of the claims used by the opposition to Flash: HTML5 makes Flash unnecessary, no one wants those resource-hogging advertisements on pages, and websites that require Flash for “design reasons” should not exist in the first place. I do believe Flash has a place in the world, and that place is on real computer. If Adobe truly wants Apple to rethink their situation, they’ll have to do much better than post screenshots of blue blocks, most of which are either advertisements, improperly configured video streams or ridiculous Facebook “apps”. (Come on, Farmville? I’m already trying hard to remove all traces of it from my Facebook feed, I really don’t want to be able to run on my iPod.)