#Iflash for android android#
Android tablets don't use the traditional scroll bars of a mouse-based UI instead, users swipe with their fingers to scroll. Scrolling the screen is a particularly egregious example. Flash developers are even more likely than traditional Web developers to populate their UIs with rollovers, fancy animations, and aesthetically appealing yet nonstandard controls, none of which work well on a device with a small screen and no mouse. The difficulties of navigating Flash UIs on a touchscreen device are increasingly troublesome, and unfortunately they're endemic to the Flash platform. This becomes especially clear when scaling bitmapped text, which becomes blocky and hard to read at small sizes.
#Iflash for android for android#
In general, the Flash Player for Android 3.0 does not do a good job of scaling bitmap images. Worse, some of the Flash video players' controls were almost impossible to activate, given the tablet's touchscreen interface.įlash lacks a certain touch As I continued my tests, it became clear that these initial problems weren't limited to streaming video. Videos that looked sharp in full-screen mode seemed to degrade in picture quality when shrunk to smaller sizes. Playback quality was mostly good but a little choppy at times, and audio occasionally seemed slightly out of sync. On sites where I could view Flash video - such as Comedy Central and MTV - results were mixed.
On the other hand, Hulu wouldn't work even with Flash installed all it would say was, "Unfortunately, this video is not available on your platform. The Xoom ships with a video player that automatically launches when you view content from YouTube or Dailymotion, so you don't need Flash for those sites. Ironically, I had a hard time finding demo cases. Streaming video is the most popular application for Flash today, so I tried that first. I wanted to see how Flash Player behaved in real-world browsing scenarios, so I skipped Adobe's canned demos and went looking for Flash content on my own. I doubted these carefully vetted showpieces would give me the whole picture, however. The installer simply adds Flash support to the existing Android Web browser, much like the Flash plug-in does for desktop browsers.Īdobe also offers a separate app called Adobe Flash Showcase, which is nothing more than a list of links to featured Flash-enabled sites.
There's no stand-alone Flash app for Android. Honeycomb tablet owners who want to run Flash Player will need the Android 3.0.1 update, which Motorola pushed out for the Xoom in March.
#Iflash for android for free#
Video, because you demand it Installing Flash Player 10.2 is easy enough it's available for free from the Android Market. Unfortunately, my results weren't particularly encouraging. Would Flash be a game-changer for Android, giving Honeycomb tablets a clear advantage over the iPad at last? I wanted to find out, so I grabbed InfoWorld's demo Xoom and set off on a journey through the Flash-enabled Web. Adobe has since released a beta Flash Player 10.2 for Android 3.0, making Honeycomb the first tablet-centric platform to support Flash content.
But both reviews were conducted back when neither platform supported Flash. When InfoWorld compared the Xoom to the original iPad, we found Motorola's tablet to be a credible yet inferior competitor, and it paled still further when pitted against the newer iPad 2. The Xoom is the first device to ship with Google's Android 3.0 OS, code-named "Honeycomb," which features a new UI "designed from the ground up for tablets." Right now, the iPad's top competitor is the Motorola Xoom, which has been available in the United States from Verizon since February. This creates an ideal opportunity for competing tablet makers to step in and fill the void. But Apple famously won't allow Adobe Flash on its iOS mobile devices, including the iPad.
With their larger screens, long-lasting batteries, and powerful CPUs, tablets seem well suited for the kinds of rich multimedia applications that confound ordinary smartphones.
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