This is a fair point, but it's Adobe as much as anyone who has been promoting this sort of misleading expectation.
Go out and ask 10 random people if they expect their smartphone to perform exactly like a powerful desktop computer and offer the same experience. Heck, I have yet so see the angry crowd marching towards cupertino because some HTML website's hover menu navigation doesn't work or they can't use Google Docs.
There are plenty of examples out there where well coded JS out performs Flash, and without crippling your CPU at the same time.
Please show me a single one, or better yet, a bunch of examples. Go.
Flash is NOT free to develop for, remember.
There are free flash IDEs.
I think Flash is actually better places for delivering these interfaces, on paper anyway. If you actually take a look at open source projects like jQueryMobile (and its UI components) it soon becomes apparent that developing this stuff in Flash feels... horribly dated, old fashioned. There are far more flexible, faster ways of developing slick touch interfaces that will match and exceed anything that can be done in Flash right now.
I think it's a bad idea anyway to develop whole sites in Flash. I think Flash is fine when used in the right place. Apart from that I desagree that Flash feels horribly dated. E.g., did you ever take a look at things like Flex?
I wish Adobe would focus their energy on developing better JS tools, supporting frameworks like jQuery and the HTML5 platform. I'm fairly confident the writing is on the wall, and it will take some kind of miracle product to save Flash in the long run. It's not dead yet: the vast majority of video content will continue to be delivered in Flash for a long time to come.
And the day that happens, whining will continue or even increase. If designers with no real programming skills have the ability to do the same crappy ads or even whole interactive sites in a Flash-like IDE, they won't hesistate. And all the sudden you have badly performing "content" all over the web but this time you can't really block it so easily like Flash.
The developers are really the key, here.
Whats the point of using flash for your site, if you are gonna have to rewrite your site to optimize it for mobile anyway?
But then developers are presented with a choice. Rebuild your app in flash or rebuild your app in HTML 5. Which would they choose given the current climate? Essentially, are the shortcomings of Flash on a mobile device enough to warrant developers migrating to HTML 5?
I totally don't get this argument: A Flash app wouldn't have to
rebuild, just
adapted or
tweaked a little! In the case of HTML it would have to be a complete rewrite from the ground up. That can really be quite a HUGE difference.
Any site that doesn't offer a non-flash web experience is a poor website.
Yep, I agree, see above. Complete Flash-only websites aren't desireable.
Web devs will still have to deploy custom mobile versions of their flash stuff.
No more or less than they would have to when doing it all in HTML5. And they don't necessarily have to have 2 separate versions of the Flash content, they would just need to test it on a phone and then make some adjustments to
the common codebase for the Flash content that is shared among desktop and mobile/touch.
However, since "old flash" doesn't really work well on mobile Flash, and everyone needs to make "mobile friendly" flash (essentially: new Flash), why didn't Adobe just make a completely different mobile platform, which wasn't necessarily fully compatible with existing Flash, but used the same or very similar development tools? They could have gotten it done earlier, kept devs in their ecosystem, and avoided this whole "well, this site works like crap, but this one is ok" business that's only going to make Flash look fragmented and bad.
Erm, you mean something like Flash Lite? Oh wait, that actually existed for years now! Thank god it finally disappears in exchange for the "fulll" Flash.
Look, Flash is kind of old, it ran on my old G3 iMac and can definitely work on lower end devices.
I give up.
The one with the better battery performance?
Well, the battery question. Its's always a compromise between battery performance vs. features vs. device weight/thickness, right? I for one think that being able to see Flash content when I want it and sacrificing a little battery life for the time I enjoy it as a good one. Just like with "regular" video or games.
But you aren't getting the point about VB8 and Theora. It doesn't matter that VB8 and Ogg Theora don't have overt license fees if they're risky to deploy because of the potential for litigation; H.264 is just a safer bet. Never mind the fact that it's superior to both of the other codecs.
Well, NO codec is safe, really. Even not H.264. And you know what? After all these years that Theora existed, anybody has yet to sue them or Mozilla Foundation, just vague accusitions of the MPEG-LA were made, led by a patent troll, btw.
In six months, the issues will be gone. This is the first edition to run on the very slow 2.2 OS. Once 3.0 comes out, these smartphones will all be able to run Flash just fine... except the iPhone, unless we jailbreak it!
Why is that? Android 2.2 was actually quite a huge step performance wise due to the inclusion of a JIT compiler. I think you are building up unrealistic expectations, here.
I can't imagine Flash going smoothly on any mobile device, since even an "average" laptop can't play Flash smoothly.
Flash is too system-hungry and requires keyboard/mouse input, so I don't think Flash will ever be useful or acceptable on a mobile device.
What's that? How can something ever run a platfom smoothly? I can write JavaScript that brings your browser to a crawl in a heartbeat. As I said above, Flash isn't new and can perform well on lower end devices, even my iMac G3 could.
Regarding keyboard/mouse input: How is HTML any different? They can both support touch screens, it's just that CONTENT exists that just wasn't build with touch in mind on both sides.
Can I point out that Moore's law does not apply to energy density of battery storage? Or reducing power draw per mhz?
A direct consequence of Moore's law is that you automatically get chips with the same performance as before but that are smaller and thus consume less power.
Nope - just saying flash can't handle multi touch.
Despite that, Flash is not usable via multi-touch control.
Flash does support multi-touch.
They did test with a pull-out keyboard. And Flash still didn't recognize the keyboard presses.
Which I find strange. Whatever the cause may be, though. May be Adobe's fault, may be that of the programmer or just that Android reports keyboard events a little differently. Who knows, really.
But I'll try anyway:
Does anybody have information why Flash has performance and compatibility issues on so many devices?
I mean, Adobe can make great products so they have the know how.
And Flash is strategically quite important to Adobe so why couldn't they create a better experience?
What are the technical difficulties they face?
My take:
So things just can't be fixed. If a Flash app was designed to work with mouse and keyboard only, you just run into problems on touch devices. The same is true for HTML/CSS/JS content, of course.
Videos inside a Flash container can only be hardware decoded under the following circumstances:
- They need to be in H.264 format
- The hardware decoder has to support the right profile and the resolution of the video (e.g. the iPad's hardware decoder only support H.264 up to 720p resolution and no high profile videos that are super heavily compressed) and the bandwidth of the video should not exceed a certain number X.
If any of the above is not the case, the CPU has to do the decoding. That's when you see the "Not optimized for mobile" hint. If the resolution/bandwidth is too high for fluid decoding of the video on the ARM CPU, there is not a lot Adobe can do about it. But I think we will see more apropriate H.264 videos going forward, the older Video codecs supported by Flash will disappear.
Besides that Adobe did tremendous efforts on animation rendering on mobile devices. According to their release notes they use OpenGL ES a lot.
Yes, I think we'll see that they are. The point is, if you've got animation programmed in Flash, it has a ton of code that screws up with touch. So, you need a separate version from the one for mice. And maybe another one for tablets.
I've heard there are these wonderful programming constructs called conditional blocks
No problem doing it all in one fancy Flash file.
Once somebody brings out a tool to do all that HTML5 can do, it's game over.
It'll be game over for the Flash haters, because you realise that what you really hated was badly developed content that makes your laptop fans scream. Now just brought to you by HTML5
said I should just stay home. Atleast google gives me the option to try to get to my destination instead of just not even letting me try... 
