right on

flash vs ipod apps

I've been thinking recently about the not-so-recent controversy of Apple not supporting Flash for the iPod and the family. My take on this is forget about the politics, why would you want to write your apps for a mobile device in Flash to begin with?

For that to happen you'd have to have an interpreter that runs the flash player on an iPod, which means that the functionality of Flash would have to be emulated on top of the native APIs for the device. Then you'd run an app through it, which means a second layer of emulation. Flash is not a light-weight interpreter to begin with, it is not efficient in terms of data representation and storage, in terms of use of high-level constructs. You don't need to know much to understand that this is the case: just think of how long it takes to load any serious flash app to your browser and how easily the browser is overwhelmed by even medium-sized apps.

From my experience with it I would want to port my apps to the native API for whatever device I'm developing them for. The less layers of interpreting you have in between, the better your program will run. To me this whole thing is a non-issue.