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As the ratio of Flash-having to non-Flash-having devices decreases, more and more sites will have to consider how much money they're leaving on the table by not
by glhaynes 17y ago
As the ratio of Flash-having to non-Flash-having devices decreases, more and more sites will have to consider how much money they're leaving on the table by not supporting them.
For some this will be "easy" -- if you're a video site, serve up your vids in HTML5 <video> in addition to Flash. We've already seen YouTube and Vimeo take their first steps in this direction; Hulu appears to be going this way too.
If you're Farmville, it's harder. But would it really cost Farmville more to have a team rewrite their app in HTML than it would to not support all the people on non-Flash devices that want to play their game and will instead play something else? Perhaps today... 2 years from now, I strongly doubt it. Keep in mind, Apple's devices aren't the only devices that don't have Flash: Flash availability is actually decreasing on the web. And you know Farmville's CEO's non-techy spouse is gonna get an iPad. If Farmville's CTO hasn't already priced out what a move to HTML would cost, they're negligent.
- elai 17y agoFor something as dynamic as farm ville, what is more likely is just porting a farm ville client to iPhone/iPad vs. painfully recreating it in HTML so it can work badly on a smartphone screen. Most facebook apps in the beginning were HTML based. One of zynga's early, successful apps was mafia wars, a purely html game. The decision to create farmville in flash was completely intentional.
- mortenjorck 17y agoThis trend is going to be massively increased by Adobe's addition of an iPhone compiler to Flash CS5 (barring capricious behavior on Apple's part to exclude these non-XCode-compiled binaries from the App Store, in which case, war). Ironically, this will likely go further to decrease the use of the Flash player than anything Adobe has ever done.