Fran's Blog

The recent announcements that Adobe are working on a full version of their Flash platform for mobile is making me jittery. Over the years of developing I have been well aware that Flash, for whatever reason, hogs resources. It uses processor aplenty, battery life, RAM. I’ve even worked on some projects where it has slowed my whole browser environment down to a crawl.

I have a fairly new Macbook at home. Using a fully 100% Flash site usually gets it to warm up, start sweating and the fan starts after a while. Not in a small way mind, but full on “OH CHRIST, THE PROCESSOR IS BLOWING UP”.

On a phone, this will be much worse with the lesser processor, less RAM, less cache, less battery life. It isn’t just the Flash platform that gets me worried though. It’s the actionscripter. I have used a fair amount of Android apps now, some are written with memory in mind. But some hog so much system resource I am forced to close it and uninstall to get my phone to work again. This doesn’t even depend on the complexity of the app. A Flash developer tends not to worry too much about battery life etc. as they predominantly develop for a notebook or desktop, as long as it works there, we’re all good. Not to mention the download needed for assets like the HD background to make it all look nice that the designer wants in there. How will the processor cope with that? The designer cares not for battery life or bandwidth.

So those of you with an iphone, thank your lucky stars that you may never have this issue. You may still have the resource hog applications every now and then, but we all have that.