Farewell to Android
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Does Flash matter on mobile?
What is Twitter?The lack of Adobe Flash support by Apple started with the first iteration of the iPhone. Now one year and five months after the release of the iPad and six months after the release of the iPad 2; the first Flash-based game was ported and released for the tablet.
Machinarium is a great game, first released in 2009, it's a fun interactive point and click puzzler.
But there is a catch: Machinarium is iPad 2 only. The aged hardware of the first generation iPad is unable to run the game. By using Adobe Air, Amanita Design was able to release the game for the tablet. However, there is a cost associated to running Machinarium via Adobe Air – the game can severely drain the iPad's battery.
As the first Adobe Air ported game, what does that say for more games that are possibly built with a Flash core?
For the regular user, applications and games built with a Flash core developed through Adobe Air will have no big effect on every day usage of their iPhones or iPads. With Flash support already on Android and BlackBerry, the chance for increased spread of Flash through Adobe Air on iOS is small.
iOS developers have moved past the lack of Flash and have created a lot of great apps that don’t rely on the development platform. Machinarium is an outlier game on iOS because it was originally developed with Flash two years ago. iOS-original developed apps and games are being created within the specifications of the operating system and it would be unusual for many developers to jump immediately to Flash.
That isn’t to say that many Flash based browser apps might use a similar system and port their apps through Adobe Air. It would actually make sense for social games that are available through different webapps and on phones. But this structure for release would only work for newer applications because most browser based social games release a smartphone app in conjunction with their desktop relatives and existing games already have a mobile version available.
It might be easier to create applications through Flash, but developing an application that needs to be funneled through Adobe Air for release on newer iOS devices appears to be additional work unless developers are looking for a simultaneous release on all possible platforms.
Machinarium’s release on iPad 2 is great for game fans because now they get a portable version of an incredible game. But propagation of Adobe Air and Flash content on iOS? That's an open door that most don’t appear to need to walk through.
Few things to note...
This is NOT the first Flash-based game released to the Apple app store. It's the first game to be the #1 app across the entire app store for a week. Other games include Pyramix, Neptune, Kung Fu Battle Slots, Mr Mixit and more (over 100 for sure that I know of) and all of these apps run on iPad 1, iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, etc.
You are correct, Machinarium is iPad 2 only, but that's not a limitation of AIR....it's because of the memory requirements of the game itself. The creators of Machinarium ported an existing Flash-based desktop app to the mobile environment. They admit themselves that if they had built the app for mobile from scratch that it would be a "different story". When building for desktop, we never worry about using a lot of memory because every desktop machine has at least a GB, but the iPad limits you to 155MB of memory.
Despite this, it was selected as "Game of the Week" in iTunes and shot to the #1 game in a matter of hours...and then shot to the #1 app across the entire app store the following day.
Yes, they could have done a rewrite and used Objective C and it would likely run on the iPad 1 and run super smooth, but it would take dramatically longer to do. They had to make a choice and it seems like their gamble paid off in a huge way. It's a similar story to the iPhone 4. There are many apps (many are native) that only run on the iPhone 4 because the iPhone 3 doesn't have the horsepower to handle it.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if an Android tablet version isn't coming soon...something not possible if they had built it in Obj C. That's the real advantage of using the Adobe stack - multiple platforms. For example, the game Pyramix - it's available for iOS devices, Android, PlayBook and is sold in 5 stores - iTunes, Android Market, Barnes and Noble Nook (surprising sales there), Amazon Android store and Blackberry App world. A desktop version will be released very soon. Also - wait until you see what's coming very soon in Flash/AIR -- http://gregsramblings.com/2011/09/03/remember-adobe-flash/ -- be sure to check out the Unity post. Imagine being able to author games like that and put them in all of the above platforms!
There are lots of great choices for building apps - there is always native, there are platforms like Adobe and Ansca Corona, and there are various HTML/JS options using JQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch packaged with something like PhoneGap. Each has strengths and weaknesses and none are a perfect fit for all apps, but I will go out on a limb and say that the Adobe solution offers by far the most bang for the buck.
Don't try to be too fashionable by blaming the underlying technology. Sometimes the story is more complex than that. Flash/AIR and other Adobe technologies have their issues - i'll be the first to admit it, but when writing an article that immediately claims that it's the Adobe technology causing the issue is a bit irresponsible, especially when you start out making a very false claim in the first paragraph about this being the first game.
I have no idea how many readers you have, but hopefully this will help clarify things a bit. I'm standing by to answer any questions that you might have.
Thanks!
Greg