The 2009 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is just around the corner. Rumors of new iPhone hardware and software are running rampant. One frequently surfaced request (or more accurately, complaint) is the lack of Flash support on iPhone and iPod touch. While I can see why the general public raises that question, I am perplexed when it comes from technology pundits/bloggers and interaction design professionals. Simply put: Flash is ill suited for the touch interface.
Consider the following issues:
1. Rollover does not compute
On a touch interface, touching is clicking and dragging is scrolling. There is simply no rollover event. Unfortunately, more often than not Flash-based interfaces rely heavily on rollover to trigger control mechanism or content delivery. This problem serious undermines the practicality of Flash implementation.
This is Hulu player with rollover.
Without rollover, you can’t even pause the video.
2. No assisted text input and menu selection
To alleviate the inherent restrictions of small screen (and fat fingers), Apple introduced some UI enhancements to improve the usability of touch interface. Two obvious instances are the text field and menu “picker.” Flash programs cannot invoke these assisted UI components, thus making mundane tasks such as menu selection and keyboard control difficult, if not altogether impossible.
You won’t be able to access input assistance with Flash.
3. Non-standard UI can be non-functional
Flash designers for years have been pushing the envelope of interactivity by breaking UI conventions. Some of them are so out of the norm that they are barely usable on a computer. Now imagine running them on a small touch screen. UI anomalies as benign as scrollbars without up/down arrows will be broken, not to mention more serious offenses.
None of the Favourite Website Awards winners are likely to function flawlessly.
A related issue to non-standard UI is the proliferation of minuscule text and UI components. Yes, they look clean and minimal but are the bane of mobile device users. No one likes repeatedly zooming in and out (plus scrolling around) a page. Since mobile Safari’s double-click-to-zoom function is designed to zoom onto a HTML element (e.g., an <IMG> or a <table>), zooming within a Flash object is likely to require lots of pinching and scrolling.
Look how thin that timeline under Hulu player is. To jump to a different point of the video, you’d need to pinch, scroll, touch, and then pinch again; repeat if you don’t like what you see and want to move again.
5. Flash is a CPU hog
Anyone who’s ever used a CPU monitor knows how processing intensive Flash is. The problem is even more acute for Macs. According to an Ars Technica test, Hulu video consumes 56% of CPU on a Mac Pro. The situation is most likely to be worse on an iPhone. What’s more, there are many badly written Flash programs out there. Unlike the typical iPhone apps, which have to be examined and approved by Apple, rogue Flash programs can wreak havoc on your phone unchecked.
You don’t want to see this when receiving an important call.
Of course one may argue that Flash publishers can modify their Flash content for iPhone. However, not considering the fact that it’s impossible to redevelop every piece of existing Flash programs, the very idea of device specific development great diminishes the main benefit of Flash — cross platform deployment. This makes one wonder the effectiveness of Adobe’s Open Screen Project, which aspires to provide an uniform environment across platforms. But I digress. The bottom-line is that Flash on iPhone cannot be a priority to Apple and it’s not something to look forward to for end users either.
Fang-Yu Lin
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Great post! It’s true – touch doesn’t work well with Flash and Flash doesn’t work well with touch.
However, there are touchscreen phones that have Flash support, like Nokia’s Symbian S60 OS –based 5800 Xpressmusic and the upcoming N97, and Samsung’s Omnia and Omnia HD which run the Symbian S60 OS as well. Again, Flash doesn’t work well with the _touch_ _interface_ on those phones either, but nonetheless it allows the user to view Flash video content etc while browsing the web on the phone. And Nokia’s N97 features a joystick/trackpad type of controller next to the fold out QWERTY keyboard, which can be used for control when touching the screen isn’t the best option.
And Nokia’s new Maemo OS (Linux) based device, due to be officially announced and even released (?) later this year, with a large touch screen, will offer full support for Flash 9, not Flash Lite like on the N97 and the Samsung phones. It’s rather a web tablet than just a cell phone, but physically not much bigger than the N97 and works as a phone as well. With 1GB of runtime memory and a new faster processor, it should be able to handle any Flash content easily without slowing down.
So even if Flash doesn’t suite the iPhone well in its current incarnation, Apple may still have to come up with a solution to include Flash in the future, or then the iPhone users who keep asking about Flash will just have to accept that they won’t be able to view Flash content without switching to a different device.
A year ago, we explored similar issues as to why establishing a multitouch-based UI branding was incompatible with Flash in:
The new UI wars: Why there’s no Flash on iPhone 2.0
http://counternotions.com/2008/06/17/flash-iphone/
If you’re talking about taking Flash made for the web and putting it on an iPhone, then sure it would be a bad idea. The same holds true for most sites, games, and applications made with any platform.
All of the device-specific interface elements mentioned could be made available to the Flash player, as has been done for years with FlashLite on many mobile devices.
As for the term cpu hog, sounds like Hulu is the cpu hog, not Flash. Same rules apply to Flash as anything else – optimize the memory usage.
No, the only reason I can think of to not have a Flash player on the iPhone is a simple one – with a Flash player installed, perhaps the app store loses relevance.
Kontra: Great write-up. Thank you for sharing.
Timbot: Thanks for your feedback. It seems to me the ball is in Adobe’s court to come up with a version of Flash that is suitable for touch interface and lower-powered devices. But the problem with that solution is the incompatibility it’d cause, thus making it rather useless for users who wants to access current Flash contents out there.
Fang
Interesting post!
As pointed out, I guess it may be more for strategic reasons of the two giants. Apple wouldn’t want Adobe to take away its software control, and it would be tricky for Adobe to come aboard the current Apple platform as is.