So a well-known limitation of the Safari browser that comes with iPhones and iPods is that they can’t play Flash videos.
A while ago I was trying to get around that, and I figured I’d try either Chrome or Opera for iOS and see if they supported Flash videos. Neither one did. So I figured it was probably some requirement that Apple mandated, that Flash support for iOS was just not allowed.
However, it turns out there are several programs you can totally legitimately buy or download from the App Store which are basically web browsers that play Flash. I’m using one called Photon, which seems to work just ifne.
So if it’s NOT something that Apple forbids, why don’t the “big” 3rd party browsers support it? It’s not like Google couldn’t afford to just outright purchase the company that make Photon, or what have you. Is there some political reason for it? Or is there some weird situation where the flash browsers can’t be advertised as web browsers, even though they are? Anyone know what the deal is?
Flash isn’t just a video format, it’s a rich internet application browser plugin, whose functionality includes a lot of stuff that Apple doesn’t allow: plugins in the first place, for example.
Flash video is basically obsolete; it’s not part of the HTML5 standard that all the browsers are pushing, and every site that matters should have moved on years ago.
The combination of these two things: Flash video as the only option is actually pretty uncommon these days, and having to explain why some “Flash” things work and some “Flash” things don’t, means it’s easier for the browsers to just not bother with it at all.
I wondered about this too for the longest time, since Apple and Adobe were pretty much joined at the hip from the beginning. Then I found out the crucial reason: Flash drains battery power. Can’t have those mobile devices get recharged even more often.
Another one of my skill sets gets sucked away into uselessness…
They can be advertised as browsers. Photon’s app description in the iTunes Store says it’s a “browser” several times.
But when you use the Photon browser app in an iOS device, you are not running Flash. What is happening is you are viewing that web page via a Photon server that is streaming the web page content back to you. So Photon is sort of the man in the middle between you and the content. You tell it what web page you want to view, it loads up that page first into its own server where it can handle Flash content, then sends what that web page looks like back to you. You aren’t running Flash natively in iOS.
From every review I’ve read, the quality is very hit and miss and it can be very slow at times, leading to frustration. Plus, you have to deal with bandwidth set up and problems. That sounds like a large headache for any larger company that would want to buy it, especially considering the low rate of return.
The twitch app streams live stuff just fine (well, for certain values of “just fine”), but doesn’t do replays/past broadcasts, which causes quite a bit of consternation.
It’s isn’t only battery power, as I remember it. Apple was also concerned about security issues, and how to implement some Flash features on a touch screen (for example, “mouseover” events). I don’t think any single factor was a deal-breaker, but the number of issues added together made it not worthwhile to implement.