Built in Flash player

[Kauai]

Desktop based browsers like Chrome as well as the already Apple approved Skyfire both sport built in flash players. I'm not very technologically inclined, at least not beyond a certain point, so I thought I'd throw my curiosities out to you whom are more informed on this stuff than I am. What is holding back third-party iPad browsers from building built in flash players? RAM? Battery? Apple (Why did they approve Skyfire then?) Or is it harder than it seems?

I'd love to see HTML5 take over Flash but in today's day and age I'd also love to have flash on my iPad. At least, when I have an outlet nearby.

Also, while Skyfire supports flash, it's extremely buggy - only available for the iPhone and is a fairly crappy browser when you're not doing flash based tasks (for the 15% of flash it can support) but it would be awesome to see Atomic, Perfect or iCab roll out something like the tap to see flash programs on computers.

 

[Stetrain]

Skyfire doesn't have flash built in on the iPhone. They have servers which play the flash video and then stream it to you via the normal iOS h.264 streaming.

There will probably be an iPad version at some point, I know that they had to roll out the iPhone release very slowly because the demand was too much for their servers.

 

[Kauai]

Ah, I see. Is there a fundamental difference as to why Chrome could do it then but an iPad browser couldn't? Or, since my previous assumption about Apple 'Already having approved a Flash browser' is mostly incorrect, is the obstacle indeed Apple.

 

[Stetrain]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Yes, the obstacle is Apple. It isn't necessarily a specific ban on flash. Apple doesn't allow any apps to execute downloaded code of any kind.

If Flash does show up officially on iOS it will be put there by Apple.