It’s no secret that Steve Jobs is on a mission to move the world away from Flash and towards HTML5 supported technologies. Jobs has been quoted as saying “Flash is full of security holes,” and it’s an “old technology” during meetings with the Wall Street Journal folks. He has a bit of a point when it comes to video streaming, but, I’m surprised that not many people are talking about how Apple‘s trying to stop Flash games from competing with their iPhone games. If Flash gets approved game developers will be able to continue using the flash platform instead of using the iPhone SDK. That’s the real issue here, not streaming video content. Flash games will challenge Apple’s AppStore model, and that’s something Apple doesn’t want to encourage.
We haven’t had much proof that flash kills battery life on mobile devices, and we certainly haven’t been given the option to test it out on our iPhones, but there’s an interesting video circulating the internet today that shows the repercussions of having Flash on a mobile device.
The video below shows a Nexus One phone running Flash 10.1. The Nexus One plays a couple of games, and streams a couple of videos during an 8 minute period. How does the battery hold up? It seems like the battery goes from around 50% to about 25% by the seven minute mark of the video — a pretty big battery hit for 8 minutes of use.
Maybe Jobs has a point, Flash just isn’t ready for mobile devices.
Update (Feb 24: 11:57PM EST) : We’ve been getting some blow back about this post so I thought I’d update everyone.
- There are claims from the video creator that the video in question below was edited extensively. The funny thing is that there’s no indication of editing. I’ve watched the video over and over again.
- A number of people have made similar claims in the comments of his vimeo page, but he never explains what’s up with his video. He just keeps claiming it was edited together despite the clock running continuously the whole time (attached a screenshot below).
- I wish I had the foresight to screen capture this stuff, but I’m pretty sure Michael Chaize said at some point that he’s an Adobe employee.
- A bunch of people are complaining about comments being deleted, which seems about right considering the “working at adobe” comment disappeared (again, I might be wrong), but Mark Doherty calls him a colleague here.
- I’ve downloaded the video to my hard drive from Vimeo just in case it mysteriously disappears over night.
- You can read an Adobe employees response to my post here.
Sample Conversation from Vimeo Page (admission of guilt? You can decide).
Video of Flash running on the Nexus One.
Flash Player 10.1 on Google Nexus One from michael chaize on Vimeo.
February 23rd, 2010 at 5:11 pm
I agree with the article, but google phones in general have a terrible track record of having short battery lives anyway.
February 25th, 2010 at 9:09 am
First off, I have a DROID and if it isn’t used the battery will last for almost a week. Even under heavy usage the battery will last all day, and that’s the same as my iPhone, so it’s not better or worse on battery life than the iPhone.
Also, the video never says the battery is dead after 10 minutes, it fades out! You don’t even see what the battery life is!?
ASSuming is bad.
February 24th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Since you have been so kind jumping on conclusions, here is another “interesting video” as you call it, showing a 6% battery drain on a 17 minutes youtube browser experience in the Nexus One…
http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2010/02/24/battery-performance-with-flash-player-10-1-on-nexus-one/
I cannot play Plants VS Zombies on my iPhone for 20 minutes, it almost drains all my battery… So is that game as bad as Steve Jobs Flash badness ? lol…
February 24th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
Here’s the numbers from the video. At no point does the clock jump significantly between the 50% and 25% battery life. The first number is the time on the phone, the second number is the timestamp in the video. It’s not overly disjointed.
3:59pm at 0:43min
4:01pm at 1:39min
4:02PM at 2:45min
4:04PM at 4:37min
4:05PM at 5:42min
At 3:59PM the battery is about 50%, and at 4:05PM it’s at about 25%. That’s five minutes of time that’s elapsed. Unless he sat down at the exact same time on another day and edited it together… I have a hard time seeing how it was “edited”.
February 25th, 2010 at 5:35 am
Hi Joshua,
You are forgetting that the battery indicator is a simple graphic with 4 steps, the last two are yellow/red and do not indicate capacity.
The four step mechanism is pretty standard on mobile phones, and it’s used ironically to save battery power instead of polling the battery repeatedly and redrawing the screen.
If the battery is at 51% and drops to 48% then this can appear like the battery now has 25% power. Batteries chemistry can also have an effect, but let’s not complicate things further.
The real litmus test is in checking the raw percentile from the Battery Usage, shown in my blog post.
Michael Chaize (Adobe) has created another much longer video that demonstrates video and game play over a few hours, look for that on my blog soon.
Mark
Adobe
February 25th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Thanks for taking the time to comment Mark. I can see how a battery may be on the verge of the indicator showing 25% and switching over in the period of about five minutes.
What I don’t understand is how it’s been claimed that the video is an edited piece. There were claims that it was an edited piece both on your blog and in the comments on the vimeo page.
If you mean that this entire five minute period was only a small sample piece from a larger body of work, and you don’t mean that it was a bunch of footage edited together then you should be a little more clear. People like Alec McEachran (below) are clearly confused (he’s not alone). Can you elaborate on which it is so I can add an update to the post?
Thanks
February 25th, 2010 at 9:10 am
Steve is full of crap along with his iPhone fanboys.
February 24th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Very scientific of you… evidence: one possibly edited video.
A counter-argument: http://bit.ly/cdtbLV
February 24th, 2010 at 8:30 pm
it’s impossible. See my reply above.
February 25th, 2010 at 6:24 am
Why it’s impossible?
February 24th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
I agree its more about keeping Flash games away from the iphone to stop app store competion. However if you check out Flash CS5 it possible for Flash developers to take Flash content and directly compile to an iphone ipa file. Then deploy through the apps store as a native app. This has a few advantages. One you can use Flash to deploy to iphone, which means brilliant Adobe development tools. This also means that the mass amount of Flash developers out there will start delivering content to the iphone. So more apps for iphone, and money if chosen through the app store for developers. And finally because Falsh is cross platform, no need to own a mac for iphone development.
February 25th, 2010 at 9:12 am
Unfortunately, Apple wants you to have to buy a Mac for iPhone development, that’s why they did it that way. Epic fail @ Apple. Also, a big reason for Apple’s crap is that they want to promote Cocoa and SproutCore and try to make Flash obsolete so Apple doesn’t become almost obsolete AGAIN.
February 25th, 2010 at 10:44 am
*high five* You’re probably one of the few commenters who actually read what I said. Thanks for that. This post was supposed to be a public gripe at Apple. The lack of flash on the iphone has everything to do with Apple losing out on their 30% profit from appstore sales, and until they can figure out a way to include flash games in the appstore there won’t be flash on the iPhone.
February 25th, 2010 at 4:06 am
Well, the only thing dicey is this blog post. Your kicking up quite a tantrum for one video. Im sure Adobe and Google measure their data a bit more professionally then just watching a single webvideo. But seeing this is a Mac-fan blog im not suprised, maybe you feel threatened?
February 25th, 2010 at 10:39 am
That’s pretty funny Macaca. Did you even read the post? Here’s a nice little quote for you. ” If Flash gets approved game developers will be able to continue using the flash platform instead of using the iPhone SDK. That’s the real issue here, not streaming video content. Flash games will challenge Apple’s AppStore model, and that’s something Apple doesn’t want to encourage.”
February 25th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Totally agree. There are a huge amount of free flash games out there that are easily as good as the stuff in the app store and thats what apple don;t want, people browsing to free game. I don;t buy any of this power consumption rubbish. If Google (Andriod), Rim (Blackberry), Synbian(Nokia), Windows Mobile, Palm, Nvidea are all building Flash into their devices and its running well then there’s no issue. These companies want their mobile’s to look good and run well, and if they can do it so could Apple.
February 25th, 2010 at 5:37 am
You have to know better how battery indicator works on Android, it doesn’t change between 50% and 25% and then it changes. It doesn’t have a continuos dropping indicator. So, it can be between 50% and 26% at the start of the video.
Finally, if you can explain how a mobile device physically can drain 350 mAh in 5 minutes I will be glad to know.
February 25th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Hi Joshua,
There are edits in the video, it was part of a longer piece.
My earlier comment also explains the indicator UI, there is no definitive answer but we have obviously shown evidence to the contraray.
Thanks,
Mark
April 18th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
Gwydion is right.
“Gwydion Says:
February 25th, 2010 at 5:37 am
You have to know better how battery indicator works on Android, it doesn’t change between 50% and 25% and then it changes. It doesn’t have a continuos dropping indicator. So, it can be between 50% and 26% at the start of the video.”
There is no way you can tell that the battery is really at 50%, it could be at 26% at the start of that video. Half bar indicates the battery charge is within 50% – 26%