Android users can finally give out shrieks of joy. Not because the Android phone is great, but because it just got BETTER. Adobe Flash has finally arrived on the Android platform. Here’s a snub to the iPhone right in its face. Adobe has finally released Adobe Flash Player 10.1 for the Android platform and things have never looked better before.
The release of the Flash player for the Android platform can be the result of the tensions escalating between Adobe and Apple. Since Apple has straight away declined the usage of the Flash in its devices and gadgets, due to the claim of it being high resource hog and not secure enough. The release of the Adobe Flash Player for Android coincides with the Google’s release of the Android’s 2.2 (FroYo) at the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco.
The Flash Player version 10.1 was completely overhauled and redesigned from scratch for the Android platform specifically. The player was designed such that it would support various mobile device inputs and at the same time optimize performance and overall battery throughput. Just to prove Apple’s allegations of Flash not being able to support multi-touch gestures and the fancy stuff that Apple likes to implement in it’s devices, Adobe seems to have gone the extra mile to make sure that the Flash player for the Android platform supports Multi-touch, various gestures, Smart Zooming, Accelerometer Inputs, and much more that basically differentiates the smart phone from the desktops.
Adobe Flash 10.1 seems to be quite serious regarding its performance. It has incorporated hardware acceleration with H.264 video decoding, Sleep Mode (which slows down the Flash Player, incase the Android phone goes into Screensaver Mode) and also an Advanced Memory Management system, which decreases RAM usage by an astounding 50%! Adobe claims that the player works with all the major chip and mobile platform players, which includes Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia, ARM and AMD).
There is a single flaw in the player at the moment. The player is supported on the Android OS 2.2 and above only. Which makes the older model Android phones won’t be supporting the Flash player anytime soon. Adobe Flash player’s performance cannot be quite understated as yet, simply because the release of the Flash Player 10.1 for the Android platform has created a major significance over the last few months only because of the basic reason of Apple’s ban of the Flash Player over the iPhone and the iPad devices. Apple wanted to bar any kind of relationship with Adobe. Many say that Apple may be working on an alternative to Adobe’s Flash Player, which would be its own proprietary software, forcing all the users to use their development kits to build applications for the iPhone or iTouch or even the iPad.
Due to the Apple’s decision to stay away from Flash, it has created huge rifts over the developers, whether they should completely leave Flash in place of HTML5. Only time will tell what comes out at the end.
Here’s a video showing the Working of the Adobe Flash Player for the Android Platform:
