iPhone vs Flash

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    http://mobile.venturebeat.com/20…

    The Flash is always greener: Why the iPhone won’t have Flash anytime soon
    January 26, 2010 | Jeff Glueck | Comments |
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    flash-applications-iphoneEditor’... note: Jeff Glueck is the chief executive of Skyfire, a company with a mission to dramatically improve the browsing experience on mobile phones. Skyfire’s browser in version 1.5 is available on Windows Mobile and Nokia Series 60 smartphones, and will be coming to more platforms in 2010. Glueck wrote this editorial for VentureBeat.

    Internet web browsing has improved greatly since the days of WAP browsers, and mobile enthusiasts have been right to celebrate the new era since the iPhone launch. And yet the promise of the “full” Internet being available on your iPhone (or any other smartphone) remains held up. Although Adobe’s Flash technology powers more than 80 percent of the video on the “desktop internet” today, little of that content is available on the iPhone. Meanwhile, Apple says Flash is not coming to the iPhone anytime soon, leaving techies and rich media fans lusting for a solution.

    Some claim that Apple’s lack of Flash results from a political decision by chief executive Steve Jobs to block the Flash runtime, to maintain tighter control of the iPhone and iTunes App Store. I don’t have any insider knowledge of Apple’s reasoning, but I believe Jobs is actually focused on the consumer experience, and is insightful and realistic about the limitations of native Flash on mobile devices.

    At Skyfire, we’ve devoted three years of R&D to making complex rich media, applications and video work on constrained wireless devices. We’re familiar with the issues involved, and we’ve had to leverage the power of cloud computing to overcome the above constraints.

    Let me suggest some hot-button reasons why full Flash will struggle without leveraging the cloud:

    1. Very real device limitations
    2. Bandwidth issues
    3. Battery life impacts
    4. The “moving target” of web technologies

    Reason 1: Device capabilities

    The reality is that mobile handsets, including smartphones like the iPhone, do not have the same computing horsepower as the latest laptops and desktops by a long shot — not in CPU, memory, battery life, nor bandwidth.

    Many Flash applications use 50 megabytes or more of runtime memory. That’s just too much for handhelds today.

    There is only one “mobile” device running native Flash in the world: the Nokia N900, a Maemo Linux device which is very close to a full computer with a 1 Ghz CPU, and retails for up to 700 Euros. In practice, even the N900 cannot deliver a useful Flash experience over a 3G connection. When we tried, it could only crawl to 1-2 frames per second with 100% CPU utilization. That’s not a video. It’s a slide show. (Adobe has plans to bring Flash 10.1 to a number of other smartphones.)

    Given this reality, Apple has looked ahead and understands the troubles that native Flash will face on mobile. To be clear, Flash is a phenomenally useful tool and there is a reason why thousands of the best creatives and content companies, and millions of websites, benefit from Flash. The situation for mobile is in no way Adobe’s fault. The mobile networks and devices just aren’t ready.

    Reason 2: Battery life

    Flash is computationally intensive; every line, color, and motion must be vector calculated by the CPU. Increased CPU cycles mean a big drain on the battery. With the iPhone recently blowing away the competition in a J.D. Power customer satisfaction survey in every category but battery life, this must be high on the list of Jobs’ concerns about Flash running on the iPhone.

    Reason 3: Bandwidth and network issues

    When I speak to smart observers, they are convinced that wireless spectrum jams will get worse over the next couple years, not better.

    The alleged “utopia” of infinite bandwidth from next-gen networks (LTE or 4G) remains years away from full deployment across the US, with new hardware expensive and complex to roll out. Plus, it’s like building a wider highway in Los Angeles — traffic gets better, but then people drive more, with bigger cars, until traffic jams return. Just as commutes and cars get bigger, internet sites are becoming more data intense, and the files that we try to push around the networks get heavier.

    Flash files are typically very large. AT&T has struggled to keep up with demand from data-hungry iPhone users.The network is already jammed by just a fraction of multimedia reached by iPhones. Imagine users trying to download an HD video on mobile. It won’t even play, and everyone in the vicinity will suffer network slowdown until it errors out.

    If full Flash were widely used by mobile phones, already-clogged networks would get even slower and more debilitated.

    Reason 4: The moving target

    Desktop technologies keep advancing. What constitutes “standard” technology on the web moves forward each year. Mobile keeps falling behind that moving target.

    As mobile technology advances, it makes more and more things possible on-the-go. The capabilities of the average smartphone today are more impressive and dynamic than the average desktop a decade ago. But desktops have not stood still, and web applications today require exponentially more power than a decade ago. By the time Flash 10 is deployed flawlessly on mobile, it will already be behind the next-generation of desktop Flash.

    In closing: Mobile solutions exist in the cloud(s)

    skyfire_glueck_photoThere is no infinite bandwidth or performance.

    So where does that leave us? Mobile internet users should be able to access all the content on the Internet, especially all the good stuff like video and slideshows that are currently only in Flash formats on millions of websites.

    Cloud computing data centers can assist devices and networks by rendering Flash and other plug-ins in the cloud, then applying sophisticated compression software. This makes for fast page loads, and protects the wireless networks by compressing streamed content by over 70 percent. Plus, thanks to powerful cloud servers, users can get websites to load exactly as they look on your desktop... with video, animations, links, and more.

    The biggest challenge is the mentality that the solution will come only from the brute force of bigger hardware and more network equipment and spectrum, rather than from smart software solutions like cloud computing. In the last few months, that’s starting to change.

    Maybe nirvana exists, but you’ll find it in the clouds.

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    Clarence [Moderator] 1 week ago
    Hi Jeff,

    Very interesting solution for the problem...who would have thought cloud computing? What kind of cloud computing technologies are you specifically talking about?
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    Tanner H [Moderator] 1 week ago
    Interesting read, Jeff. However, your comments on the Nokia N900 are not accurate. The N900 has a 600 mhz processor (see http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/spec…), not a 1ghz processor, and is available for $569 USD direct from Nokia (see http://store.nokia.com). Flash video also plays extremely well on the device, but it DOES depend on the site. (For example, YouTube works brilliantly while Hulu does not.) These are not because of inherent limitations with Flash, but with differing implementations of Flash video players.

    I also find it interesting that throughout this entire debate you fail to mention HTML5 at all. If Flash has any competitor, it is not the cloud but the HTML5 spec.
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    Diavoli [Moderator] 1 week ago
    N900 is fine running flash, currently running 9.4 and is waiting for upgrade to 10.1 so it can run Hulu etc..., your not saying the facts straight. What were you trying to stream? Give me the link, I'll try it on my N900.
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    yorg [Moderator] 1 week ago
    I am not sure when you tested flash on the N900 but it is running great on mine!

    Maybe you had a pre release unit?
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    Ryan Abel [Moderator] 1 week ago
    Gotta love "journalist" bloggers who fail to do their homework.
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    george [Moderator] 6 days ago
    Why the iPhone won’t have Flash anytime soon? because the iphone screen resolution is very small. there is not enough pixels to view the flash intensive videos. so the phone switches automatically to mobile versions. iphone battery life suck anyway so just keep the flash away for now. why can't apple increase the screen resolution? because the OS is not capable of handling many pixels without loss of speed. my N900 plays flash like charm
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    Tom Waelti [Moderator] 6 days ago
    Currently, Flash 9.4 on the N900 is not hardware accelerated, that's the reason Flash can be choppy sometimes (mostly for videos, games work well very often). Once Adobe brings 10.1, you will get always fluid video on the N900 (there is a demo video somewhere).
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    Antoine RJ Wright [Moderator] 6 days ago
    I have to agree with many of the comments here, this article while starting with the right premise, didn't really take the technical or philosophical turns that could have been more fruitful for discussion.

    For one, Flash doesn't need "the cloud" any more or less than any other web-based technologies do. The assumption here is that Flash is like other multimedia, however its a platform used for a container for usually incompatible media and for complex interactions through its specific scripting language. If you will, you can call it nearly an operating system, just without the overhead, and with the assumption that many of the interactions are driven through some kind of IP connection.

    Concerning these points:
    1. Very real device limitations
    2. Bandwidth issues
    3. Battery life impacts
    4. The “moving target” of web technologies

    There are no limitations with any of the upper tier smartphones in this wise. Flash Lite has been running successfully on Nokia's Symbian smartphones, and plenty of others (usually not in the US) for many, many years now. When the iPhone released without compatibility to even Flash Lite, this was seen as a slight for Apple, not Adobe, as the run-time was already well optimized for mobile device hardware/software.

    Bandwidth issues are a very real issue with mobile devices, specifically smartphones and cellular-connected laptops. However, their bandwidth issues relate first to the signaling used to maintain the connection, the architecture of the network(s), and then the end-user's use of whatever web-based media that might be flowing over that connection. Its being increasingly realized that many carriers in the US did not build out their networks for the dearth of persons who are using always-on data connections that they push these same users to. So while Flash can contribute to issues here, bandwidth can't be cited as a reason for no Flash on mobile devices - especially when the counter argument is that "the cloud" is a better item to leverage. They (Flash and the cloud) are both the same - a media platform - in this case.

    Battery life is an issue for all mobile device. Again, though, I will cite the use of Flash Lite for media *and* user interfaces on mobile devices which has been optimized for such constrained hardware. Battery life is no more a limitation than the processor or the user - that is to say, this point just doesn't stand in this argument either (again, Flash and the cloud are platforms, both would utilize the available physics of a battery the same as usage will determine impact).

    Lastly, the section on the "moving target of web technologies" should have been more fleshed out. In light of the recent video which showed that the Webkit-based browser on the iPhone is capable of video play through the use of HTML5, I would say that it is not only well positioned for web technologies, but that the target is moving *towards* the hardware limitations, and not away from them. Flash (again) has been available in three versions of its lightweight Flash Lite format for almost 5 years now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl... and happened to have always been ahead of where mobile device hardware was - it tried to emulate the desktop experience as best as possible. These points weren't raised, and therefore this is where I say in the beginning that this article could have been better fleshed out for discussion.

    I agree with your statement, "Mobile internet users should be able to access all the content on the Internet, especially all the good stuff like video and slideshows that are currently only in Flash formats on millions of websites." The change will come not from "the cloud" though, it will come from content producers creating accessible content (for example: http://camendesign.com/code/vide… or the S5 HTML slideshow format) which uses plugin platforms like Flash to enhance the experience, not be the only experience.
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    xxMurdakillxx [Moderator] 6 days ago
    Just wanted to let anyone that read this know that the N900 plays flash very well and the man had to have only tested one site with bad reception but that is 100 flase and im tryping this on my N900.
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    Jeffrey Glueck [Moderator] 6 days ago
    I wanted to address the comments both supportive and critical, and say I appreciate the interest in the topic. I stand by the article and wanted a chance to clarify and reply.

    As an aside, anyone watching the iPad launch today got to see a very big Flash error as Steve Jobs browsed NYTimes.com with Safari, which happens to be a nice visual supporting my point.
    http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/…...

    First, the minor issues people raised: The N900 yes does have Flash capabilities, my article said that. I'll come back to the larger implications. The phone price has come down to 569 Euros but when it first came out it sold for more. http://boutique.nokia.fr/nokia-f…... (Someone cited the USD price as a supposed rebuttal, but that's irrelevant; this phone sells in large numbers only in Europe.) Yes, it's a 600 mhz CPU, so I appreciate correction on that item. The example remains the same: it's a high-end, Maemo/Linux phone and an expensive device relative to vast majority of mobile phones in the world. Along with 1 GHZ phones like NexusOne and Moto Droid, we're talking about the top couple percent of phones in the world. When we talk with Nokia executives, this is their equivalent high-end device to Droid.

    Now the thrust of the article, I'd like to clarify, is NOT that Flash cannot run on such a high-end phone. It's that most of the Flash content out there across the internet is un-optimized, looking across the breadth of publishers on the web. And that will be true when Adobe ships Flash 10.1 in the next few months on a few high end phones, and it will be true for a long, long time. Given that, my warning is that the 3G networks are not set to handle unoptimized Flash, so we're going to see a deluge of data and huge strain on networks, with a bad user experiecnce. And asking the phones to do local rendering, as Flash does, will mean they run very hot (ouch!) and will burn through battery. The Cloud can help with that, which some folks clearly did not understand.

    I write not as a "journalist" but as a mobile application entrepreneur and we live this every day. By processing Flash and Silverlight and other plug-ins in the cloud, rather than rendering locally, and transcoding into a format and bit rate that's easily decoded by the phone and adapted to network conditions in real time, we can start video faster, while saving the network 73% via data compression, and improving battery life 4x while playing video. Which can mean the difference between watching a show for 15 minutes before the phone dies, or enjoying a full hour.

    Now I appreciate that some people can get a good experience on the N900, but they are not thinking about the bandwidth and battery issues most likely, and I suspect a lot of these people were on WiFi or on a mobile-optimized site, rather than playing the Full Flash (unoptimized) that you find on millions of long tail websites. Now we did not just test one site, so I'll share what we did, and we got the same results in retesting this morning.

    We were in the US on a T-mobile 3G connection with an N900 including Flash 9.4. DailyMotion.com took 39 seconds to load and played 1-2 frames per second. Hulu wouldn't load, since it needs Flash 10... (said "Flash Upgrade Required"). Break.com took 140 seconds without loading, and we gave up. MySpace video took 120 seconds of loading and buffering, and did play, but very choppily. Howcast.com took 120 seconds and never started. Ebaumsworld.com would not start for us either. In all these cases we saw CPU utilization near 100%. Maybe you will get better results, or maybe we were unlucky, but we replicated it several times.

    To be clear, we saw much better performance on WiFi. Perhaps if we'd tested in Europe, bandwidth would have been much better, we admit. And YouTube is a whole separate case, they have mobile-optimized files for almost any device, rare and almost unique in this respect. But millions of sites are out there without big mobile tech teams and transcoding vendors, and that's the reality for years to come. These un-optimized files are very taxing on a 54 kbps cellular connection, and on the battery life.

    By contrast, on Skyfire Symbian v1.5, we can play video on a site like DailyMotion at 12 frames per second and compress a movie trailer from 12 MB to 3 MB of data, without the user on a small screen noting the degradation. And they'll enjoy that the clip will start playing in 5-10 seconds.

    We respect that handset makers and anchor software leaders like Adobe are investing a lot in hardware-accelerated decoding and other efforts to improve things with Flash 10.1 when it ships, and we're eager to see those improvements, since we all depend on limited bandwidth for our applications and businesses. Still, we think it won't approach the 73% data compression that the cloud can add, for files unoptimized for mobile. Skyfire is not alone in pursuing this. Other companies like ByteMobile, with a slightly different architecture, are trying this on operator networks.

    As to HTML5, at Skyfire we are big fans of HTML5 and support all efforts for web standards. The reality is that there is no standard yet across all devices for HTML5 video, as the debates between Ogg, h264, etc., continue, and various legal issues with codecs and IP rights bedevil it. HTML5 allows a publisher to offer a low-quality or high-quality file for the user, but it doesn't have a capacity yet for "Adaptive Streaming," where the file bit rate is adjusted in real time based on network and device conditions. This is something that Skyfire and Move Networks both offer, for instance. HTML5 has not yet addressed the question of how constrained networks get protected from mobile users trying to stream high-quality or HD-video over base stations that can't handle that. A cloud web service can offer a solution. Under any conceivable scenario, it would take years for all internet publishers to re-write to HTML5 standards AND include mobile detection and alternate file versions for mobile... and in the meanwhile, cloud services can provide a translation service and bridge.

    As to the person who cited that Flash Lite has been around for years... yes, we are well aware of that, and it supports our point that it's been very hard for "real" Flash to adapt to mobile. Very little content you wanted to watch was ever written for Flash Lite.

    Thanks to all of you for the supportive messages and for the full-throated debate. We welcome it.
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    Antoine RJ Wright [Moderator] 5 days ago in reply to Jeffrey Glueck
    Hello Jeff; thanks for taking the time to come back to this thread and respond. That shows a lot about your character and convictions that helped you pen this article.

    The note about the HTML5 spec not supporting/enabling adaptive streaming is one of those pieces of the video spec that was missed, and is quite a shame there. I'd love to know if this is something that could end up coming as a work around.

    Flash Lite is/has indeed been a bad-stepchild of Flash's efforts on the web and in mobile. A lot more could/should have been done with it sooner.

    Unoptimized Flash (and media formats in general) have been a bandwidth problem for ages. But then, shoudn't the argument go again towards the content creators towards playing to the level of the devices that will access it, rather than the users and their devices having to accept compromises? Wouldn't that be the better statement to the "iPhone never supporting Flash" than just saying to let the cloud do it?
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    Ryan Abel [Moderator] 5 days ago
    You're still not doing your homework, Jeff. The Droid uses the same SoC as the N900 (the OMAP3430, 600MHz).

    I'd like to see you back up your claims about US sales with some numbers. Oh, wait, there aren't any, are there? Conjecture then.
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    Ben [Moderator] 5 days ago
    The Flashblock add-on for Firefox has been downloaded nearly 8 million times - shouldn't this tell developers that Flash isn't a popular format for a portion of end users? Developers might love it, users not so much - and the availability of Flashblock can't be popular with advertisers.

    Personally? I have Flashblock installed on all three of my computers (2 x Mac, 1 x XP), connected over DSL, and am glad to not see Flash when I don't wish to.
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    Pecos Bill [Moderator] 4 days ago
    Your cloud solution is nothing more than a terminal server (Citrix et al).
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    markmayne 1 day ago
    From twitter via BackType
    Why Apple isn't doing Flash for iPad/iPhone: http://bit.ly/8Xmaj5
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    Mainboardernews 2 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    FSecure: Does the iPad run Flash? http://su.pr/2uMGT4 And why it probably won't http://su.pr/7Rpg8F
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    pirate6955 2 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    @the404error matt this link might be interesting to you. Comments? http://su.pr/7Rpg8F (ipad flash etc)
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    smithalso 2 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    RT @FSecure: Does the iPad run Flash? http://su.pr/2uMGT4 And why it probably won't http://su.pr/7Rpg8F
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    FSecure 2 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    Does the iPad run Flash? http://su.pr/2uMGT4 And why it probably won't http://su.pr/7Rpg8F
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    JeffGlueck 3 days ago
    From twitter via UberVU
    @Dave_Eger Thanks for your comments on my fcc workshop. Check out my venturebeat op-ed if you want. http://bit.ly/bfaMiH
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    trash_box 3 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    RT @VentureBeat The Flash is always greener: Why the iPhone won’t have Flash anytime soon | VentureBeat http://tinyurl.com/ybwfch9
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    tmdheard 4 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    finally, some sanity! reasons why you _don't_ want Flash on your phone: http://mobile.venturebeat.com/20…
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    cassieldotcom 4 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    @katzy http://bit.ly/bfaMiHhttp://bit.ly/9lJ3aShttp://bit.ly/bweKC0 ...
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    kpi_consulting 4 days ago
    From twitter via BackType
    The Flash is always greener: Why the iPhone won’t have Flash anytime soon...http://mobile.venturebeat...
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