There was a fair bit of hullabaloo a bit ago when an early version of Adobe’s Flash engine was shown running on an Android device. As one might expect, this attracted diametrically-opposed opinions, mostly centered around the Web browsing experience. Some welcome Flash, so they can use Flash-dependent Web sites. Some loathe the Flash-based ads that might start showing up.
However, there is another facet to Flash-on-Android that sometimes gets missed in the focus on Web browsing. It would be very easy to turn a standalone Flash animation into a standalone Android application, even if we have to use a WebKit browser “thunk” to make it happen.
Let’s face it: developing in Java to the Android APIs is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea.
In fact, developing classic Android applications requires a skill set — desktop-style UI development — that has been getting swamped in recent years, replaced by radically different skill sets needed for Internet-based applications. Whether the front-end is simple HTML, AJAX, or Flash, little of it resembles using widgets and layout managers in Android (except Flex and some AJAX widget toolkits like Dojo’s Dijits). And, of course, the back end might be Java, or it might be Ruby and Rails, or it might be Python on Google App Engine, or any number of other possibilities.
Enabling Flash-based Android applications, independent of Web sites, opens up Android development to a new segment of developers, without requiring them to learn a whole new development paradigm, language, and toolchain.
Of course, Flash-based Android applications may well have their limits. They might be less efficient in power usage. They might lack access to Android system services, such as GPS and accelerometers to detect motion great and small. They may not look much like native Android applications.
Even with limitations like these, though, Flash-on-Android would be a powerful new tool for those interested in getting their wares onto Android quickly and easily.
