Flash Player and AIR for Android released
Always a catch, this time, it is that the Flash player and AIR will only be available with the upcoming Android 2.2 FroYo release. Finally however, the Android version of the Flash Player is available for download and testing for those willing to unofficially update their devices to Android 2.2.
Early reviews and demo’s of the Flash Player seemed quite positive, with Flash content on web pages running at an appreciable and usable speed. Engadget reports however that playing back unoptimized web video content caused their device to heat up and use battery quite fast.
This is quite expected though, as in their preview release hardware decoding wasn’t supported. However for unoptimized content this problem might not go away. Hardware decoders can only decode a small spectrum of encoded content which conforms to narrower specifications. Unoptimized content is the content which will usually not even play back on the device. With the Flash Player though, the content will play using the software codec. While this added functionality is great, it also means that quite a few people who don’t understand how this works might end up wasting their battery without knowing it.
Additionally, while Adobe is in the process of creating an SDK for developing Flash content for mobiles, by their own admission, the current Flex 3 / 4 SDK is not optimum for mobile content delivered via AIR or Flash. Applications developed with the desktop in mind might not be that suitable for mobile usage. So while the new Flash mobile player does allow the “full web” on the device, it can obviously not counter the limitations of the device itself.
Adobe has taken great care to ensure that the Flash Player 10.1 itself is as optimized as possible. The Flash Player on mobiles is more aggressive about saving memory, and CPU cycles — and hence the battery — of the smartphone. Flash content which is not visible, is not run; Flash content is throttled in standby mode; etc. The player has also been heavily optimised for the ARM platform and to make use of hardware acceleration where possible.
Even so, some care will need to be taken by the developers and designers of websites as well to make sure their content works properly on mobile devices. The web is becoming a repository of applications, and often such application — whether they be Web 2.0, HTML5 or Flash based — are designed with the PCs in mind. There will always be a limitation to how much of the “full web” will work a device, however at-least now the limitation is technical not artificial.