“Flash Is Great.” — Anonymous Flash Developer
Anonymous Flash Developer — I used to think that Android fanboys worked themselves into the biggest tizzy when you suggest their favorite device of the week may not be the absolute bee's knees. I was wrong. Flash fanboys are much worse.
Context & Ripple Effects
The anonymous developer's 'Flash is great' post lands in the middle of a year-long fight over whether Flash belongs on phones at all. Steve Jobs set the frame in April 2010 with his public case against Flash, which drew an immediate rebuttal from Adobe's own Flash Blog, and earlier in the year critics had argued the best way for Adobe to save Flash was to kill it in favor of HTML5. The empirical record since then has not been kind: LAPTOP Mag's August testing found the Android player weak enough to vindicate Jobs, and Silicon Alley Insider ran the same-day counterpoint that Flash on Samsung's Galaxy Tab was 'an embarrassing disaster.'
What makes this post notable is who is saying it — not an Adobe executive but a working Flash developer, conceding in the same breath that Flash's most vocal defenders react more defensively than Android fanboys ever did. With Android having taken the top US smartphone OS spot per Gartner in August 2010, the quality of Flash on those devices is now Adobe's storefront window.
First-order effects
- Adobe faces a credibility problem from inside its own developer base: when even loyalists open with 'Flash is great' while bracing for backlash, the platform's advocates are defending against the implementation record rather than disputing it.
- Samsung and other Android hardware makers shipping Flash pre-installed absorb the reputational damage of poor playback performance on flagship products like the Galaxy Tab, independent of anything Adobe says.
Second-order effects
- Every negative review of Flash on Android strengthens the hand of developers weighing the HTML5 route that commentators have pushed since early 2010, raising the cost for Adobe of shipping a subpar mobile player.
- Apple's no-Flash position, mocked as ideological back in 2007 when the iPhone launched without it, gets retroactively recast as an engineering call as Android-side performance evidence accumulates.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile platform competition shifts from which technologies are allowed to which implementations actually work — making runtime quality, not licensing philosophy, the deciding factor in whether Flash survives on phones.
- Developer communities become leading indicators of platform health: internal defection or defensive posture among a platform's own builders tends to precede broader ecosystem migration.
The trend: The Flash-versus-HTML5 fight is moving from an ideological dispute between Apple and Adobe to an empirical verdict being delivered device by device on Android.