Back in October 2007 I wrote a post entitled “Does Flash Lite Have a Future?” which is one of my most popular posts and it sparked some interesting comments. The main argument I had for this wasn’t that Flash Lite was going down the pan, it was simply that we didn’t need it because the full Flash Player would be suitable for mobile due to touch-screen, higher powered mobile devices and lower power requirements for our applications anyway (the argument here is that we only use a tiny percentage of the CPU for most applications now unlike before).
Think about it another way. You can happily code a Flex application to work in the browser, or in the AIR runtime, I’m doing this at the moment. Both environments have special classes available, different properties on existing classes, but you know where you are with Capabilities.playerType, this same mechanism will help on mobile, and the mobile player itself will deal with user input/interaction differences as it does at present.
This announcement from the GSMA Mobile World Congress seems to re-inforce this. I’m aware Flash Lite will continue to be used for the very low powered phones (the other end of the spectrum can hardly be called “phones” anymore when calling makes up a tiny fraction of what most kids use phones for now in the UK at least) but those’ll eventually shift to the full FP too. Windows Mobile, Google’s Android, Nokia S60/Symbian and Palm are the initial supported platforms. LG have signed up for 50 Windows Mobile devices by the looks of it, and I can see Android getting one hell of an adoption rate with OEMs struggling to compete against Symbian and iPhone, and the second that lower-end devices rise to meet the demands of Android, we’re in for a new boom era for Flash.