Flash on Android vs. HTML5

May 29, 2010

Mobile is becoming more and more important and with that how interactive our mobile experiences are becoming is also more and more important. There are many interactive technologies on the web, but none have come close yet to the wide-spread use of the powerful Flash. HTML5 is being constantly referred to as the Flash killer and while it might be a good replacement for video on the web in some circumstances, it comes up short in other areas and is generally at least several years behind Flash. HTML5 is new, but the technology that makes HTML5 interactive (JavaScript) is not new at all. Javascript is extremely powerful, but it is not meant for graphical animation, 3D and a lot of what Flash does naturally. HTML5 will have its use, but it is not yet a replacement for most of the uses for Flash. I have developed in Javascript and Flash and I for most uses I would develop rich interactive applications/interfaces in Flash over Javascript.

Here is Flash 10.1 running on Android:

As a note, this video is made by an Adobe Flash Platform Evangelist and Flash 10.1 is still in beta.

Here is another video that shows the speed of HTML5 and the speed of Flash. Flash generally is quicker in performance than HTML5.

An important part of the evolution of the mobile platform is a standard development language/environment that can reach across to many mobile devices. As Apple moves farther away from a standard mobile development language (Objective C) and Android uses Java for its applications, the one that can be deployed on all Android devices, Nokia, Blackberry, etc. is Flash. This allows a developer to take the same code written for the Android and use it on Nokia and Blackberry devices without too much modification, which means businesses can reach more people with less development cost/time. This is critical for mobile to move forward.