Without being [too] snarky, I thought it was interesting that, after meditating on your reply for a minute, I could accurately edit your response, without really distorting your observations:
I would still consider it performant, even if it does drain the battery. It drains it just as much as watching a video on the YouTube app will drain the battery.
Although I do agree with your comment, I think that Apple's reasons for ditching Flash went beyond their public words.
> It drains it just as much as watching a video on the YouTube app will drain the battery.
I very much doubt that this is true. Most modern smartphones have a dedicated video decoding chip. Flash, on the other hand, is entirely in software. This means that to play a video the system in question has to load up not just video codecs but a full-stack VM -- Flash -- as well, and the CPU is responsible for most of that responsibility. At that point the power efficiencies gained by offloading functionality to a dedicated chip are lost.
Now, Adobe might have pursued a route wherein those functions were offloaded to the AVC chip and/or the GPU, but they were not apparently successful in being able to do so.
> Although I do agree with your comment, I think that Apple's reasons for ditching Flash went beyond their public words.
Why? I think at this point history has shown that those publicly stated reasons were entirely valid. Efforts to make Flash run efficiently on tablets and smartphones failed, despite energetic attempts to do so.
Evidence tends to support the view that Flash failed on mobile on its own shortcomings.
I think everything Apple said about their reason for not allowing Flash was true. I think they really did believe it made a sucky experience that people would blame on the phones, instead of flash.
I also think that wasn't all of their reasoning on the subject. The business value of not allowing cross-platform tools was huge. It effectively created a lock-in early-on in the iPhone's tenure. Of course, I have no evidence of this, but Apple has been too shrewd not to consider it.
So, in our world, where flash sucked, it wouldn't get on the iPhone regardless of the lockin implications. But in a world where flash didn't suck, I think the same decision would have been made.
The interesting thought question is whether consumers and developers would have allowed it in that world, and, if they didn't, how would the reduced lock-in have affected iOS share.
> So, in our world, where flash sucked, it wouldn't get on the iPhone regardless of the lockin implications. But in a world where flash didn't suck, I think the same decision would have been made.
Ahh, I see. Perhaps. That is certainly a defensible position. But to continue on the speculation: I'm not so sure. If Flash hadn't sucked then there would have been demand for it that Apple would have been forced to listen to. Their position in mobile was not strong early on.
That was what I meant by my last paragraph. If flash hadn't sucked, demand may have pushed it onto the iPhone and that could have drastically altered the landscape as apps would have been cross platform, leading to less vendor lock.
As a happy Apple customer, I'm not sure if that would have been a better or worse world. I'm very happy to have Android out there, keeping competitive pressure strong, but having Apple run basically unchecked early on caused a massive revolution that altered the whole mobile world, and in a cross-platform app world, would that have happened?
Regardless of whether it is true or not, both drain the battery. Flash probably does drain it faster, but I'm only talking from a user perspective. I will watch about five minutes of video online a day, on average. The difference isn't noticeable for my use case, and probably not for most other peoples.
> Why? I think at this point history has shown that those publicly stated reasons were entirely valid.
No one said they weren't. What I'm saying is that it is likely that there are other reasons for Apple not wanting Flash on their system.
> Efforts to make Flash run efficiently on tablets and smartphones failed, despite energetic attempts to do so.
What efforts?
> Evidence tends to support the view that Flash failed on mobile on its own shortcomings.
Again, no one has said anything different. I'm saying that Flash works well on the Galaxy Nexus, and as a result will probably work fine on the iPhone if Apple wanted Flash on its system.
In a sense, "draining the battery" is the entire point of a high-performance graphics plugin and it ought to be the user's decision whether or not to play Flash games based on their need for battery time.
So I suspect "it drains the battery" is covering for a deeper issue, like perhaps: were we getting good value from Flash?
It took quite a long time for Adobe to get mobile Flash to the state it's in now. Years after iOS devices were shipping without it. The earlier mobile versions of Flash for Android were not good.
My point was more that by the time the got a reasonable level of performance out of Flash on mobile it was too late: the industry had moved away from it as a platform.
By the time dual core phones like Galaxy Nexus arrived on the market, the battle was already lost. Adobe should've made Flash "work" from the days of iPhone 3GS/first Droid.
