One of the things why Android has an advantage over Apple’s iOS is that they can play with Adobe Flash. Apple shuns Flash mainly because it strains their devices making it slow and consume a lot of battery. This is forcing companies to ditch Flash in favor of HTML5 and Adobe wants none of it.
Adobe gave up talking to Apple but instead created a workaround on their media server that will allow streaming of online Flash videos available to iOS devices. With Adobe’s Flash Media Server 4.5, content providers can deliver Flash content to different mobile devices including Apple’s iPads, iPod Touch and iPhones using the same content stream. So to make things clear, Flash on your iPad or iPhone is not device dependent but server dependent.
There’s a couple of caveats to this. Only Flash videos are supported. You still can’t play Flash games or Flash animations on your iOS device and companies still has to decide whether to get this Flash Media Server 4.5 just to make their Flash videos viewable on Apple’s devices. If you want to get geeky, what this new media server simply does is wrap the Flash video into a HLS or HTTP Live Streaming format which the iOS can handle.
It’s not the ideal solution iOS fans are looking for but it’s a step towards Flash viewing on Apple’s mobile devices. There’s still the HTML5 route anyway.
