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First Look: Flash Arrives on New Android OS (wired.com)

36 points by sendos ↗ HN
Excerpt:

"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."

55 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
tomlin
"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."

Weird. It's like Steve Jobs wasn't telling the entire truth, or something.

Timmy_C
The article also pointed out that pages that would otherwise work fine on a PC were borked or had slow performance. This is not the 1-to-1 flash support I think users are expecting.
stcredzero
Two hours of Flash = 40% battery drain. That's still a bit high. Watch a movie on the plane, play a game or two, and you land with a halfway drained battery.

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.

jasonlotito
From Apple on iPhone battery life: "5 hours of Internet use on 3G"

That level of performance is acceptable for Apple.

stcredzero
About twice as long as that in WiFi. How long would Flash 10.1 play over WiFi?
jasonlotito
Your contention was 2 hours and 40% was outside Apple's standards. I merely demonstrated that it was, in fact, within Apple's standards, as demonstrated by their own stats.

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.

stcredzero
Nope. To do that, you'd have to talk about performance strictly under 3G, or you'd have to talk about use under conditions like onboard a plane.

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.

jasonlotito
I disagree. I've already shown that 5 hours of use is acceptable in Apple's world. On top of this, 3G isn't the only available connection. The iPod is completely non-3G, and the iPad has a non-3G variant working just on wireless.

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.

glhaynes
You're saying that Flash "clearly doesn't kill battery life" but then go on to say it's no worse than 3G... well, yeah, but lots of people have complained about 3G's effect on battery life, and much of the time both features will be used at the same time so the effect on battery life is "stacked".

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?

jasonlotito
Those are good questions, and honest concerns.

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.

glhaynes
If I had Flash on my phone, I'd definitely want it to have functionality like you describe, where you have to tap to enable it. I'm sure it won't be that way out-of-the-box, though, and only a small minority of users would know to install a ClickToFlash equivalent even if it were available. So the default and by far most used configuration will be one where Flash is running much of the time that 3G is running too.

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.

joubert
are you allowed to have your phone switched on on the plane?
azim
With the exception of takeoff and landing, electronic devices are generally permitted in flight. The radio can't be switched on, but many smart phones including the iPhone have an "Airplane Mode" which turns the radios off.
joubert
Some airlines do not allow cell phones in flight/airplane mode.
spot
frankly i don't care about hours of continuous use. what i care about is that i can look up a restaurant and read their hours and menu. it takes 2 minutes. the iphone can't do it.
Maktab
More like Adobe has finally poured some engineering investment into making Flash work decently on a mobile platform. By all indications 10.1 is a massive improvement over 10. It's still not quite as good as Adobe are saying, but it seems to be a lot better.

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.

alex_c
>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.

JanezStupar
And we have Steve Jobs to thank for that. I believe that what would solve many of today's economy problems, is just a bit more balls from companies. Apple rocked the boat and we got better service. More rocking from all sides please!.
tomlin
None of what has transpired in the last few months smells of ultimatum. It's all very childish.
tomlin
Great. So Apple will support Flash now that is it up to snuff? Please.
Maktab
Probably not now, after the lines have been drawn this sharply. But what sort of argument would Apple have been able to present against Flash if a full mobile Flash port had been up to snuff two or even three years ago?
martythemaniak
First he said you didn't need a native SDK, you could make-do with web apps, then they released the SDK.

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.

tvon
So Adobe could have fixed Flash at any time, they just didn't feel like it?
otto
"Adobe says it has made tweaks that will shut down the Flash Player 10.1 when the system runs out of memory."

I'm not sure that I would call that fixed.

not_an_alien
The player has had major changes in terms of memory use, frame/execution timing, and how it is suspended or not. You're taking one phrase from a non-tech person and judging from that.
otto
I took that as a paraphrased quote from a tech journalist.

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.

cjbos
You can read the release notes to understand the changes, they detail them pretty well. First 7 pages are changes.

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.

DrSprout
Flash is an application platform. If it runs out of memory, it's an application that is responsible, and Flash naturally has to compensate.
ptomato
That's not what Engadget says.

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."

joshfinnie
I think those are two very different contexts to the useage of flash on the phone. After 30 minutes of watching video versus opening up a webpage that is based in flash are not very compariable.
AGorilla
Who cares about websites made in flash? People want flash for games and video. With that in mind, I think that engadget tested the context that most of us care about.
kenjackson
Actually the real money quote is: "the pre-release beta we have, according to Adobe, lacks hardware acceleration"

You really can't judge the power/heat of a version w/o HW acceleration.

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davidedicillo
Keep reading. Not sure about you, but I consider using 40% of charge for two hours of Flash a lot.
jasonlotito
That's actually on par with the iPhone 3GS.

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.

glhaynes
It's not clear from the article, though, whether the Android device was on 3G or WiFi... WiFi uses considerably less power.
jasonlotito
Yeah, I noticed I hand't clarified that. Even still, 5 hours of browsing highly interactive content isn't bad. You get the added bonus of Flash, which for some sites, is critical.

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.

davidedicillo
That just mean they are matching the battery performances of a one year old phone. I'd like to redo this test in a month.
jasonlotito
"I'd like to redo this test in a month."

The iPhone will still fail the test, considering it can't display flash. =)

awolf
No Hulu? ... Then what's the point?
jasonlotito
There is more to the internet then Hulu. In fact, the majority of the internet doesn't care about Hulu, because Hulu restricts access outside the US anyways. However, their are a far greater number of sites with Flash content that would benefit from this.
not_an_alien
I'm betting that that can be circumvented by changing the browser's user agent.
johnrob
I wonder if rejecting flash is Apple's 21st century version of not licensing their operating system. In the 80's, nobody knew such a move was a death magnet. Perhaps missing the mobile flash train could be something similar today.

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).

rryyan
I don't think protecting the app store is a reason why Apple is disallowing Flash on the iPhone/iPad. Apple has indicated that it runs the app store near break-even, and doesn't view it as a profit generator: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/01/26/app_store_wild.... The app store is there to sell devices -- like the iTunes store for the iPod.
glhaynes
It's not App Store revenue that Apple's concerned about, it's app exclusivity and platform control, both of which they expect to lead to device sales.
buster
So an Apple site repeats something that Apples wants us to believe... uhmm, no, i won't believe that just because they said so.

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...

MikeCapone
Any word on when Flash 10.1 is coming to OS X? Flash is such a resource hog even on my Mac Pro, I'm hoping this will mitigate the problem.
abstractbill
Adobe has consistently said Flash 10.1 will be released for all desktop platforms in the first half of 2010 (which ends in a few weeks).
not_an_alien
Depending on your needs, you may want to try the 'Gala' beta instead: http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89

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.

neovive
This is good news for the thousands of skilled Flash developers that really know how to leverage the platform for interactivity and gaming. As the article points out, content must still be optimized for 10.1 to see the most benefit and that will take time.

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.

jim-greer
We did a kongregate mobile site and I was surprised how many games played really well. The best were adapted slightly for mobile, but a lot of these are just the desktop version - the developers have never seen them on a mobile device.

http://m.kongregate.com

cjbos
Love your site! I was at a flash conference last weekend... all the adobe developers compiled to native android apps and then show them working on the nexus one. It was surprising how simple the whole process was.

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?

icefox
"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. 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?