Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right
Unfortunately, most phone users don’t have the patience for bugs that hardcore geeks like myself do. Sometime this week, either Verizon or I will get an angry call from my mom when she tries watching a Flash video that locks up the screen or plays a Flash game that won’t respond because it expects a mouse clicks rather than finger taps. Both of us will probably advise her to disable the plug-in so we won’t get called again and she won’t see Flash again.
If Adobe can’t make its mobile plug-in work effectively with all Flash content, it needs to at least warn users and give them the option to cancel before it downloads and attempts to play a game or video that isn’t compatible with Flash Player 10.1 for phones. Popping up a cryptic message that says “this video isn’t optimized for mobile” after it starts buffering is not acceptable.
More importantly, Adobe needs to have a better answer to whether or not Flash is still relevant in a world where other technologies have rapidly started displacing it. Based on my early experience with Flash Player 10.1 for mobile, it could soon join the floppy drive in the tech graveyard, something else Steve Jobs helped kill.
People just need to let this technology die and admit, as hard as it may be for them, that Jobs was right.
