Flash on Android is hardly a superhero

If you have wondered why Steve Jobs shuns Adobe Flash in Apple's gadgets, it might not be just because of his capricious nature. We have been waiting for a while for Froyo to bring the full Flash experience to Android devices, but the end results are far from impressive. Over at GigaOM they have made a video trying to run various things on a Nexus One with Froyo, and found mobile Flash still not ready for prime time.

Given the resource hog that desktop Flash is, the mobile version has proved to be a daunting task for Adobe to scale down, and port over to mobile devices. Video playback on a lot of popular news and video websites was hit-and-miss, and basically the moral of the story is that the videos still have to be specifically optimized for mobile viewing, which kind of misses the whole purpose.

In our own experience with Adobe Flash 10.1 on Froyo we noticed actual improvement displaying interactive charts, like those of Google Finance, for example, which before were not exactly "interactive", but Google recently optimized the site for mobile, so that might be it.

What about your experiences, has the Flash superhero come to the rescue on your Froyo device, or you also have some "Flashback" stories to tell?

source: GigaOM