Frash (Flash on the iPhone) - A Review

I don't have any pics or video to share about my experience with Frash.  However, I do have my memories and oh how bittersweet they are.  It should be noted that I am a Flash Platform developer and would freaking love to have Flash on my iDevices.  It should also be noted that I am a bit of an Apple fanboy.  So, lately I've had internal struggles with some of the decisions made by Apple, but I digress.  Back to Frash.  I was really excited about it.  So, I jailbroke my phone.  It was so easy to jailbreak my iPhone 4.  The only thing easier would have been to buy a Droid 2.  Anyway, once I had jailbroken my phone I went through the relatively painless process of installing Frash.  Before I move onto discussing Frash, I need to say that jailbreaking my device made my user experience seem less stable.  Apps would crash more frequently, it seemed like my battery was being used up faster, and some things just stopped working altogether, such as my Gowalla app.  I don't blame Frash for any of that.  That is just the price I paid for being willing to jailbreak my phone.

I really, really wanted to like Frash.  However, it just didn't perform very well.  I experimented by going to different Flash sites where I knew what Flash player version they were published to.  The exciting thing was, Flash pieces that were published to the latest and greatest Flash Player 10, ran very well.  Of course, things like roll overs behave oddly, but that is because actions like that don't really exist on a touch advice.  It was still gratifying though just to see a website built in Flash.  However, anything I visited that was older than Flash 10, such as Flash 9 with actionscript 2 or Flash 8, didn't work and often just crashed the Safari app all together.  I can only imagine that this is a result of Frash only supporting the latest virtual machine.  In a nutshell, Flash is a virtual machine.  However to be even more specific, Flash is two virtual machines;  one machine that runs the old scripting languages like actionscript 1 and 2, and an entirely separate virtual machine that runs the new scripting language, actionscript 3.  So, again, I think Frash may only support the virtual machine that runs AS3 and therefore older Flash sites will not operate in Frash. That is all just speculation though.  What is reality is that Frash had trouble running a lot of the Flash sites I visited.

The really disappointing aspect of Frash is that for whatever reason, it wouldn't run Flash video players.  90% of the Flash video players I tried to use with Frash gave me a socket connection error.  Not only that, any Flash YouTube video players that the iPhone would natively switch to an iPhone friendly Quicktime version, would stay in their regular Flash version and hence be rendered useless.  The 10% of Flash video players that did run, ran so slowly it wasn't worth my time.

I restored my iPhone back to it's original, locked state.  I'm happy I did so.  My Gowalla app even started working again.

So, if I had to grade Frash on performance, I would give it a C- or a D.  Maybe some day Flash will be on all devices... And the world will live as one

Comments

[Kevin Newman]

It's worth noting that Frash is current at version alpha 0.02. Any review that doesn't keep that fact in mind, is doing a disservice to the product. With Frash it's pretty clearly stated by the author of the project that it isn't even close to finished yet (repeatedly noting that videos don't work, in particular, and that it is so early in the dev process that 2 lines of code can yield massive performance improvements).

In my opinion, Frash proves that when it works, Flash can work well. The well understood gaping in holes in an unfinished product do not detract from that.

Here are some other things that aren't finished (and the author knows about): noscale screws everything up, system text access (TextFields that don't use embedded fonts) will slow everything down, hover events don't have the same workaround that they have on native Android, touch events in general are flaky, no fullscreen support - again, these haven't been implemented yet. On top of those more obviously missing features, I'm certain much of the platform work still needs to be put in there - such as having Flash receive signals that it's no longer needed (so it doesn't run in the background). Currently, if you go to a site that plays music, then quit Safari the music will continue to play - indicating that Flash is running in the background (and sucking down battery life) - again, this stuff just isn't implemented yet, it's not even a bug at this point. That's probably just the tip of what isn't actually in there.

Your review is accurate of the current state of Frash, but please don't judge the product based on what is essentially a proof of concept build, and not much more.

[Clong]

Fair enough.