Is Flash Good For iPhone?

• Hardware
• iPhone
• by meridimus about 5 Months ago

Jon Jordan, writing for Edge asked us what we thought about Flash for iPhone. You can read the article Is Flash Good For iPhone? on the Edge website and find the full transcript from Johnny Two Shoes below.

How useful will it be for you as a game developer to now be able to make native Flash apps for iPhone?

It sounds great, being able to develop in action-script and have it run on the iPhone like a native app. The only problem is it's very slow on the device, performance is pretty terrible. We've already developed High Speed Chase natively on the iPhone platform, so there's no incentive for us to start using action-script to make lower performance games now we can code natively.

Do you have any plans to do so?

We plan to experiment with the new tools, but the amount of development time we'd save probably isn't worth the performance hit on the device. It's not at a stage for us where it's a viable alternative to native iPhone development.

Would you prefer Apple to open up iPhone so it would be able to do in-browser Flash games as is now happening with every other smartphone and Flash 10.1?

The games JohnnyTwoShoes make for the web browser rely on keyboard/mouse input, the idea of flash running inside mobile safari would make our games un-playable. Portable browsing is about being lean and the flash player is an unnecessary layer of fat the iPhone can do without. Native apps can be manually optimised for performance as well as originally designed around the iPhone input methods (touch, tilt etc) which make them a much better choice for pocket gamers.

What limitations will this system have compared to building native iPhone apps from scratch?

Regardless of API's, it's got to be performance. In reality the PS3 has trouble running flash intensive applications such as games, it can just about handle video. On top of that, Mac has performance problems inside Safari. These kinds of problems seem more pressing to us over whether Flash can run on every mobile device out there.

What effect do you think this will have in terms of the number of Flash games that will be released onto the App Store?

Opening the appstore up to flash developers is likely to open the floodgates on mad content. This could be good for a small percentage of games, but mostly I feel like it will further cheapen the quality of the appstore.

full article on Edge