Flash on Android sounds FAN tastic!

Just as a preface, I can play most of the videos that the author could not on his Droid 2 (I have the Evo).  But more importantly, I can play a much longer list of videos from various other sites he didn't mention.  In the balance, I can play way more than I can't.

 

That said, he is correct that flash games are almost useless due to many needing keyboard and mouse controls, and there is an inconsistency in regards to on screen controls -- some sites will let me rewind and go to full screen by tapping while the on screen controls on other sites simply do not respond to any presses.  And if you do not have a fast 3G or wifi connection, the videos are barely watchable.

 

But Sam, I really don't understand a basic issue here -- if there are sites that are as inaccessible to me as they are to you, then we are even.  But if I can access some flash content that you can't, isn't that a plus for me?  Or do you believe that if one site fails they all fail?  That kind of thinking does not compute with me.

 

I have on-demand mode on my browser so that I can pick and choose which flash to download.  So it isn't mucking up my browsing experience like the author encountered.  But I have that option because the guys who run Google don't have an axe to grind with Adobe.

 

A co-worker of mine was demoing Facetime for me, and after 15 minutes and numerous attempts at connecting, it finally delivered 1 fps content.  Does that mean that Facetime doesn't work?

 

The thing about Jobs is that he has a habit of cutting off his nose to spite his face, and I guess it trickles down to the users too.

Oh, you mean like how some users are forgiving about their phone not being able to consistently make phone calls?

I agree with this, especially if it comes with decreased battery life and occasional crashes. Honestly, Flash content is problematic enough on desktop computers, let alone mobile devices.

 

Not really, not when Flash is embedded all over the place. You're not going to get to pick and choose what Flash content you want to try to consume. You're going to see your web browser seize up or crash or otherwise fail a lot during normal usage, because there are Flash ads on the web page you're trying to view. Every second web page crashing the browser is not a glass-half-full situation.

 

Apple is trying to make a larger point: clean this pile of junk up if you want to be invited to the party. Apple is one of the few companies in the world big enough to throw their weight around like this. And Flash is ripe for the criticism. I'm saddened that more heavyweights have not joined in putting pressure on Adobe. But Google has been so desperate to show up the iPhone that they immediately lurched toward Flash so they would be able to crow about having something Apple doesn't.

I also believe that with Apple stating they will not support Flash at all has encouraged Adobe to prove Apple wrong. I know that I haven't had any issues with Flash on my EVO and that before I had a phone that could use flash many web sites simply wouldn't load of if they did I couldn't enjoy the content on their site or play back any video that was embedded with Flash.

 

Personally I am glad that Google and others have said screw this and let's support Flash until that time when more sites are using HTML 5 as their standard. Right now HTML 5 is only utilized on a few sites where the majority of sites use Flash. I don't think I should be handcuffed by a device that doesn't allow the end user to make the decision whether or not to use something or not. Apple could simply leave it up to the consumer to enable Flash on their phone or not. In the mean time I will set back and enjoy the flash content that my EVO allows me to implement.

 

Edited by Parker Clack - 8/24/10 at 11:29pm

 

I think you're missing the part where I can pick and choose what I want to consume.  If I switch my browser to on-demand mode, the flash areas show up as boxes with green arrows.  I get to pick and choose what I want downloaded.  This means I don't have any slowdowns from having to load flash enabled ads -- in fact, I don't have to see them at all.

 

Even before the 2.2 update where it was either no flash or flash lite, I had flash enabled and I did not suffer from battery drain issues or crashes.  

 

Obviously this is very much like the reception issues with the i4 -- to users of the i4, depending on your experience, it was a big problem or no big deal (many users actually considered it PEKAC, or whatever the phone equivalent is).  For people who aren't fans of the i4, it's the only issue in the world.  As a user of an Android phone with access to flash, it is an advantage.  But if you're drinking the Jobs Kool-Aid, it's some sort of scourge. If one Android user writes that it's a failure, then that's gospel. But it really does not invalidate the feature for everyone just like reading about an i4 user complaining about reception means that every single i4 can't make calls.

Edited by Hanson - 8/20/10 at 7:15pm

May I suggest this be merged into our current "battlefront" thread? No need to further clutter up this forum or the Mac forum with threads meant only to provoke arguments. :)

The first Flash Sucks article was quite interesting, but I accepted it might have been an aberrant case; someone with a bad phone. But Kevin Tofel is no iPhone fanboy (switched from iPhone to nexus 1) and is Abby tech guy (his blog was bought by gigaom). Seeing him slag flash is compelling.



I'm sure Adobe will have a press conference about this issue shortly. That's what's expected of mobile tech companies when a small # of users have crippling usability problems due to bad design, right?



I'm sure it will be right on the heels of the PR events about those awesome screens you can't use outside. ;)

I watched that video. On my Evo. On 3g. Did you?

Just sayin'.

On my iPhone? Yes.

Just saying.

Hanson, can you watch the Flash content on the sites these naysayers are having so much trouble with? Do you have the same experience they do?

 

And when Flash is active, do you have the same poor performance of the browser and overal UI experience as seen in the video? (doesn't respond promptly to touch interaction and when it does scroll, it's jumpy and erratic)

Edited by DaveF - 9/1/10 at 8:32am

So... was this video HTML5 or did you farm it out to the YouTube app? 

 

Dave, the ability to play back video it depends on a couple of factors.  It seems the higher the bitrate and resolution, the less smoothly it runs on the phone.  I watched some photoshoot promo for Glee on Fox.com without a hitch, but a full episode of Glee had terrible audio sync problems.  Metacafe videos with the HD label were definitely busts.  However, a lot of these sites are optimized for broadband connected PC's, so the high bitrates and resolutions aren't really going to work well on a phone with 512MB of memory.  After an initial bit of stuttering, CBS.com plays well on the phone, but ABC hung at the loading screen for 3 minutes before I quit. 

 

When flash is running, the window tends to react slowly or not at all to your finger.  I get around this by having the browser in on-demand mode.  I center and resize the box before I start downloading it, so I don't really need to fiddle with it once it starts streaming.

 

I'm not sure which of these sites are Flash and which are HTML5, but here goes (note that this is over wifi at work, but it's a 1.5mbps T1, so it's probably not higher than 500-700 kpbs):

 

As far as the networks are concerned:

 

CBS: smooth

Fox: Clips are smooth, but full eps have audio/video synch issues

NBC: Slideshow

ABC: does not load

 

As far as content sites are concerned:

 

Metacafe: stuttery

Dailymotion: stuttery/slideshow

Vimeo: Butter

Veoh: Butter

Youtube: smooth

ESPN: smooth

Cracked.com: Butter

 

Once you make your way out of the network pages, Flash performs a lot better.  Note that I received the "Not Optimized for Mobile" message from pretty much all of these sites.  Even Veoh gave me that message, yet it was the smoothest of all the sites I visited, allowing me to use the on screen controls to toggle between windowed and full screen with almost no delay.

 

So is Flash a totally awesome experience all around?  Uh... define "awesome".  F'rinstance, my co-worker the other day wanted to know how Tiger's golf game was going.  So I fired up ESPN, which started live streaming the match, and one of the on screen controls popped up a window with a live scoreboard (that part surprised me -- I didn't think it could do that, and it only came up because she touched the link herself).  Is that awesome?  It's definitely impressive.  Depending on what you're interested in, it can be awesome.  OTOH, if you really want to watch full episodes from the network sites (and over 3G no less) you're mostly SOL.

 

Now, perhaps the creators of both videos weren't cherry picking the awful sites to make Flash look bad (although they both spent a lot of time with Fox and ABC).  But the demonstrations give the false idea that no Flash sites work on froyo, and that's untrue.  Is Flash fail if you really wanted to see reruns of Modern Family?  Yes.  But what if you wanted to catch Chad Ochocino's newest press conference on ESPN?  Then it's awesome.  Most people's experience will lie somewhere in between.  But I do know that there are a lot of froyo users who are streaming tons of programming and can't live without it.  So there's that as well.

I went to the website. I tapped the video. It played.
 

And that's the key discriminator between Apple and everyone else. Microsoft and Google and Adobe will let you do anything you want, even if it's a wildly inconsistent experience (some Flash is great, some crashes), and has detrimental side-effects (browser is almost unusable when Flash is active). In contrast, Apple controls the experience, which means prohibiting features that are only half-baked. Which Flash definitely is right now.

 

Which one is "better" is clearly a matter of personal preference. :)

No, I don't think that people will deem any of the newer phones a piece of junk because of Flash.  Flash is a piece of the puzzle -- no one is buying an Android phone just for flash.  They buy and enjoy their phones for a myriad of other reasons.

 

Did poor battery life ruin the original iPhone?  Did dropped calls hamper sales of the 3GS? Is the iPhone 4 junk because of the antenna issue?  Did having to be shackled to AT&T limit the iPhone's growth?  Aren't these much more important considerations than Flash?

 

Forest, trees.

A GigaOm followup:

 

http://newteevee.com/2010/09/02/is-flash-on-android-shockingly-bad-or-shockingly-great/

 

The comments section has interesting takes on why the video fails or fails to play properly, and it's not because of Flash itself.  For instance, ABC.com videos do not load because of a java script problem.  But not only is there nothing inherently wrong with Flash, but HTML5 is not the savior that Jobs claims it to be.  It's actually slower than Flash and has no advantages in battery life. 

That's a beautiful set of takeaways for Flash users: You're doing it wrong dummies! Stop trying to watch hard video. Instead, you should hand-craft custom, personal webpages before you watch the video, just like any normal user. See? Easy!

 

It reminds me of using Flash on the desktop. filled with annoyances, weird interactions with the hardware, and the need to twiddle things and monitor CPU usage. And it reminds me of why I hope to see Flash mostly go away. Maybe it could be awesome. Maybe it could all work. Maybe it could auto-sense the player and auto-adjust the stream. Maybe ABC could fix their website and javascripts. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But right now, even the apologists say it's a mess.

 

I'm sure it's great if you want to futz with such nonsense. But there's a lot of us who are quite happy to not even think about that and get on with life without Flash (and hope Flash largely dies a quick death). It will be much more interesting if and when all these problems are fixed and Flash is broadly usable without users needing to intuit the video stream properties and hand-fixing the problems of major websites.

Dave, you miss the entire point of the video.  It's not offered as a fix, but rather a troubleshooting exercise -- the Flash video is fine, it's the page that is causing the slowdowns.  The video creator's suggestion about opening in another window probably won't fly with the network pages that want to intersperse the viewing with ads, but he was able to pinpoint the problem, and it wasn't Flash.  Not only that, but videos not optimized for mobile can play fine in Flash, which means that the content providers can do nothing to the videos and still have them play or convert everything to HMTL5 for nothing other than to satisfy Jobs' vendetta.

 

What is abundantly clear now is that the whole Flash kerkuffle is nothing more than Jobsian FUD considering HTML5 is no better and probably a little worse than Flash.  Why would anyone think that a world where Flash is replaced by HTML5 would be any better?  Do you think that these pages would be coded any better?  Adobe is not making these pages, the content providers are, and they are the ones who are dropping the ball here.  Flash is a tool just like HTML5 is a tool -- you can use it correctly or you can use it incorrectly.

 

But Jobs would have you believe that Flash is the reason why these sites are bad.  But that's not the case -- Job's worst nightmare would be for all the sites to convert their video to HTML5 and then, due to incompatible coding, works just like Flash does (and doesn't) on all the iOS devices throughout the land.  But he needn't worry, because most websites are not going to go through the trouble of converting all of their videos.

 

But I don't think that most content providers really care all that much about the mobile streaming experience because its so new and the data speeds are so inconsistent.  Streaming video didn't really take off as a feature until most users migrated from dial-up to broadband.  So the experience now is kind of like streaming video was circa 1998.  But you know what?  It got better.  And just like bandwidth and hardware for desktop PC's are robust enough to overcome any deficiencies in coding, the day will come, probably as soon as next year, when an Android device will plow through it and play Metacafe and Fox videos without a hitch.  And maybe even ABC!

 

Flash isn't going anywhere.  This is one pissing contest Jobs will not win.

I didn't watch the video; I read the article. Core excuses for Flash were:
 

"You're watching it wrong"

and

"Users should hand-fix the web-coding errors of corporate sites"

 

I was unimpressed. Because, for all the excuses, Flash still is an erratic experience even for the apologists.

 

Now, on this matter, I am biased against Flash. It's not an "open" standard. It's a proprietary standard controlled by one company that's not done an especially great job of producing high-quality plug-ins. It's now time to replace Flash as the default video-playback mechanism for desktop and mobile use, with something not directly owned and controlled by a single company. On this, Apple is quite correct.

 

On the mobile side: it will probably get better. Javascript will get fixed and they'll make it load outside the web page and the mobile plug-in will deal with high bitrate stuff better. But when plays perfectly and everyone is again using Flash as the defacto web standard, we should be sad that a single company controls such a crucial and integral part of the "web".

 

Isn't that what everyone is afraid of Apple for? They should have the same fear with respect to Adobe.

 

You're reading it wrong.

I was getting a bit fed up with Dolphin HD needing to completely reload the previous page when you went back, so in the past month, I've started using Opera Mini more and more for web surfing because it caches the previous page, meaning you can jump back and immediately click on another link.  As a browser, it's better than Opera Mini on WinMo, but the experience lags in comparison to the other Android web browsers.  Some of the sites only load gimped mobile versions and there is no pinch and zoom functionality, which is annoying on certain sites like ew.com where the pages load formatted for landscape.  Still, I read forums voraciously, and Mini's speed and its ability to cache multiple pages for offline reading makes up for a lot of the drawbacks.  Oh, and one more thing -- Opera Mini doesn't do flash.

 

The funny thing is, I didn't realize how much I got used to watching flash on the Evo, so much so that I will copy the video URL and paste it into Dolphin just to watch the video.  There have been multiple updates to Flash mobile since the last post was made on this thread, and while some sites aren't as smooth as others, I haven't had any problems watching the videos on the sites I go to.  

 

The bottom line is that Flash is a definite enhancement to the mobile web experience.  As an individual factor it's not a make or break, but it's something I would definitely miss if I couldn't have it, and when I encounter a sports report that's video only (which is becoming increasingly more common), I don't hesitate to press play.

 

And yes, Sam, it's FAN-tastic!

You'd be surprised Sam.  I spent last week cleaning off a virus from a Macbook Pro.. and we ended up just formatting and re-installing.  What happened?  They picked up something through a fake "jailbreak" app, and all their mac would leap around like a madman trying to open up bogus websites.

 

(as to the backing up, I agree.. but I don't care what OS you're on, I see that one all the time  "I thought the external drive was safe for that!  I didn't know it could go bad like that!")

LOL.  I pointed a couple coworker/friends to the upcoming Archos Android tablets along w/ the Samsung Galaxy, and one of them said he wants a Windoze tablet instead.  I basically said why the heck would you want that?  And he gave me a humorous excuse about wanting to be anti-establishment and that's what Windoze on mobile has become.

 

Personally, although I may end up w/ an Android device myself, I've started recommending most non-techie folks (especially those of the older generation who still have not gotten into computers) to just go get an iPad unless they really need a traditional, general purpose computer.  In the case of my closest relatives, I may even be willing to host iTunes for them.

 

_Man_