An enterprising developer has proven that with a little work, Flash will work just fine on the iPad and iPhone, as long as you’re comfortable jailbreaking your device. Yes you will have problems–Flash is intended for use with a mouse, and not touch-based input methods. But certainly it gives hope that enterprising developers can be able to force Apple’s hand.
The program is called “Frash,” and will work in Safari Mobile through a compatibility layer. You can download Frash for iPad for FREE. The program is actually a port of the official Adobe Flash plug-in that is already available for Android devices. Performance is actually pretty decent–sorry Mr. Jobs, there goes your trademark excuse for not allowing Flash at all.
Frash will currently only run on the iPad, but there are plans to port it to the iPhone as well. Only the 3GS and iPhone 4 would be supported, obviously for performance reasons.
The poster of the video says that Frash will be released when it’s stable, and that keyboard and video support are being worked on. However, for video to work it would “require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone.”
Cross your fingers they get it to work, and hopefully force Apple to tear down that wall.
Frash iPad is a blow for Apple and Steve Jobs since he have made it very clear that Flash will never be an option on devices like the iPhone and iPad. But making that decision is like showing a red rag to a bull–tell people they can’t have something and they’ll surely want it more.
The inevitable has therefore happened, and Flash has been ported to the iPad. You need to jailbreak your iPad of course, but once done, this port works with Safari using a compatibility layer.
It’s called Frash, and an image of it running on iPad can be seen above. An image isn’t good enough to convince people it runs though, so a video has been put on YouTube showing Frash running on a forthcoming iPhone port. The video description gives some more insight into the port:
Frash is a port of the Adobe Flash runtime for Android to the iPhone, using a compatibility layer, by comex…Frash can currently run most Flash programs natively in the MobileSafari browser. Frash uses a multi-process model similar to Chrome on the desktop, so a crash in the Frash/Flash plugin doesn’t take down the browser. Video and keyboard input are currently not supported. The former will require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone, but the latter should be reasonably easy to implement.
The port was done from the Android version of Flash 10.1 by comex who also created the Spirit jailbreak.
Take it with a grain of salt, but it’s looking like some prayers have been answered on this Fourth of July — Flash (or is that “Frash iPad“?) is running on this man’s iPad, cleverly ported from Android.
The YouTube video claims that by using a compatibility layer, the Android runtime can play Flash content natively in Safari, but only on iPad so far — iPhone 3GS support is planned soon, as is iOS 4, and there’s a call for developers to move the project forward at GitHub.
We’ve no way of determining its legitimacy at this moment, but it sure seems like Comex (he of the iPad “Spirit” jailbreak) has outdone himself this time, and hey, where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right? See Strongbad answer emails on iOS, right after the break.
Update: It appears Comex has indeed been working on this project for some time; a second blurry video after the break (running on iPhone) shows us what it used to look like.
