Flash on the iPhone: What’s holding it back

Perhaps more contentious than any other of the iPhone’s limitations is a lack of support for Adobe Flash. Some see it as repudiation of Apple’s claims that Safari on the iPhone offers a full Internet experience, not the “watered down” version offered by other mobile devices. However, there are some good reasons for Apple’s decision to leave Flash out, and some even better reasons for Apple to not follow the route established by other mobile phones with Flash.

Performance considerations Speculation holds that the iPhone uses a Samsung processor running at somewhere around 667 MHz. That’s quite fast for a handheld device, but not necessarily beefy enough to handle full-blown Flash content. We previously noted that the iPhone’s JavaScript performance is relatively poor, delivering slow benchmarks and choking on some complex AJAX pages. Rendering vectors, as required by most Flash media, is generally an even more processor intensive application, and might result in a dismal browsing experience on the iPhone.

What about Flash lite? Flash lite is a scaled down version of Flash designed specifically for mobile devices. The latest version, Flash Lite 2.x, is based on Flash Player 7 and supports ActionScript 2. However, that doesn’t mean that all Flash Player 7 content will play on a device supporting Flash Lite 2.x. Flash Video and Rich Text Style support (CSS), for instance, are not supported by Flash Lite.

An Adobe Flash Lite FAQ notes:

“Since the runtime memory and CPU processing power available for Flash content playback on mobile devices is limited, content created for Flash Player 7 may not run appropriately on mobile devices.”

As such, just adding Flash Lite support to the iPhone would not ensure playback of all, or even a majority of Flash content available on the Web. In fact, the iPhone’s use of a Web browser that fully renders pages in a manner similar to Desktop browsers may be a limiting factor.

Jens Chr Brynildsen of Flash Magazine told us:

“There are quite a few (manufacturers) that find Flash useful. There are MP3 players (iRiver U10), Cameras (Kodak), set top boxes, PDA’s (several manufacturers) and even car stereos (Jaguar). Most devices implement the Flash Lite spec and not the full Flash Player due to CPU and memory issues. [...] What you should note is that most of these devices run in a somewhat controlled environment. They can (to some extent) control what kind of Flash movies are played on the device. You cannot do this on an iPhone. If an iPhone runs across a Flash movie such as this or this it would certainly choke at both the required bandwidth, CPU and screen estate. By omitting Flash, Apple ensures a fast experience for the end user since 90% of all ads will not be loaded. So - I can certainly understand why they do not want to add a Flash Player.”

In essence, Flash Lite is not a replacement for standard Flash in the sense of a full browsing experience. Thus far it’s been used primarily as a means for implementing custom interfaces on mobile devices or delivering proprietary content built specifically to perform well within the bounds of a mobile device’s performance/memory limitations. Since the iPhone does, in most ways, deliver the full strength Internet, watered down Flash might not mesh.

What we could see on the iPhone is a device-specific, third category of Flash somewhere between Flash Lite and full-blown Flash. The implementation would have to include some level of access to the majority of full browser-oriented Flash available on the Web (unlike Flash lite) while taking processor and memory limitations into account.

AJAX and Flash in harmony A concern expressed by some developers who have already invested heavily in developing content for the iPhone is that they could have accomplished desired goals more easily with Flash than AJAX, and an announcement of iPhone Flash capabilities at this point would be an effective negation of work already done. Apple’s Web development guidelines explicitly warn against inclusion of Flash in sites designed for the iPhone.

As posted by user BikingBill on the iPhone Web Developer group (in response to the comment “Of course, if Flash is implemented, a lot of our work will be thrown aside, if it can be done faster in Flash.”

“This is a critical point.  If we’re building multiplayer games for iPhone using the current SDK, that effort would be wasted if Flash was coming.  Uncertainty about Flash would gave most developers pause about undertaking ambitious development efforts.”

Some developers see Flash inclusion purely as a boon, however. Lee Brimelow of Frog Design told us:

“I think from a development perspective, enabling Flash on the iPhone can only be a positive thing. Developers could then choose whether they want to develop in AJAX or Flash, much the same way as happens on the web today. In my opinion, the iPhone could only benefit from the move.”

And of course, we know Adobe’s stance on the issue…

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