Frash project brings Flash to iPad via hack and compatibility layer
July 4th, 2010 by scottjanousek
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...So the news of the day (in regards to Flash on devices) is that the hacker: comex has managed to get Flash content running on iPad by leveraging the Android Flash runtime and some hacking.
The videos look promising for the hacker and developer communities to gawk at, but it requires a jailbroken iPad and a bit of tinkering to get it to work.
Frash is a port of the Adobe Flash runtime for Android to the iPhone, using a compatibility layer, by comex ( http://twitter.com/comex ).
Frash can currently run most Flash programs natively in the Mobile Safari browser. Frash currently only runs on the iPad, but support for other devices (3GS+ only due to technical restrictions) is planned, as well as support for iOS 4.
A release is planned for when Frash is stable. Developers are welcome to join the effort at http://github.com/comex/frash – fork it and send a pull request with your patches.
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. You can see this while I’m playing Alien Hominid: the ad above crashed (probably a Frash bug), but Safari stays open just fine, and continues to play other Flash content on the page.
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.
…and if anyone from Adobe reads this: Hosting the libflashplayer.so binary somewhere accessible outside the Android Market would make this a lot easier to distribute
.
You can find the source project for Frash here.
Apple’s made it clear that Flash is not currently in its interest for their iOS devices and all their bets are on HTML5 (at least at this time).
However, we’ll just see how the rest of the year pans out when Android becomes a de-facto standard for Flash 10.1, and other Open Screen Project proponents start to “reveal some of their chips”.