Flash Is Fundamentally Flawed On Touch Screen Devices

A Flash developer offers a good explanation on why Flash would not work well on touch screen devices like the iPad:

"I’m a full-time Flash developer and I’d love to get paid to make Flash sites for iPad. I want that to make sense—but it doesn’t. Flash on the iPad will not (and should not) happen—and the main reason, as I see it, is one that never gets talked about: Current Flash sites could never be made work well on any touchscreen device, and this cannot be solved by Apple, Adobe, or magical new hardware. That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem. ... All that Apple and Adobe could ever do is make current Flash content visible. It would be seen, but very often would not work."

Click here to read the article.

And here's my take on this ...

More than just hover/mouseover problem, there are many other issues I see here. Flash is fundamentally based on a single pointer, while multitouch devices can allow many touch points at any one time.

So how is flash going to interpret moving your finger over it ? Is it a hover,  drag or scroll ? When you touch the screen, is that hovering or a click ? What about when you touch with 2 or 3 fingers ? Is that like having 2 or 3 mouse cursors at the same time ? If you touch two different buttons on a flash app at the same time, what happens ?

Is there a workaround for this ? Probably, but it will require most Flash sites to be redesigned. And even then, it would not provide the best possible user experience because Flash does not fundamentally support multitouch gestures.

Some are arguing that Apple should just support Flash anyway, even if half of the Flash sites out there would not work properly. Well, one must remember that to Apple, user experience is the most important part of their product design. When users start browsing around and find that many websites don't work properly because it uses Flash, that's just bad user experience. They are not going to care why it doesn't work. As far as they are concerned, it's a problem with Apple's product, even though the problem is caused by Adobe's Flash plugin.

By excluding Flash altogether, Apple is putting the pressure on web designers to redesign their websites for the iPhone and the upcoming iPad. Even now, if you use your iPhone to browse the majority of the popular websites, you will find that they have an iPhone optimised version of their site. In fact, there are many sites with special iPhone apps that makes it even easier to access the site's contents (e.g. Wired, Engadget, etc). So, not having Flash really isn't a big deal.

I should also come clean and tell you now that I personally hate Flash. If you have ever tried to open a website and your computer grinds to a halt, it's likely due to Flash. I have personally encountered this soooooo many times both on Windows and Mac. If they can't even get Flash to work flawlessly on a full blown computer, what makes you think they can get it to work well on a mobile device that has a significantly slower CPU ?

Update: Apparently, the latest Flash plugin 10.1 beta adds multitouch support, but this does not change the fact that all the flash content currently out there needs to be redesigned in order to take advantage of this. And this brings us back to the problem of not all websites working properly ...