Last day to freely install Flash on your Android device!

August 15 2012

Today, August 15th, is the last day that Adobe lets you install Flash on your Android mobile. After that date, no more (link). Adobe offers a nice roadmap for Flash/Air, exposing some of the arguments behind stopping Flash on Android. While this is good news for moving towards an all-HTML5 ecosystem for mobile interaction, it also means that designers are loosing a nifty tool for building prototypes on mobiles. I have never been a huge fan of Flash, but I have used it extensively on many projects, to quickly cobble graphical interface ideas and hardware into something that is semi-workable and presentable. It was never very elegant (remember that serial – network socket bridge!) , but it worked well enough in most cases.

What are the alternatives to build and deploy interactive prototypes on mobiles these days?

Native apps
It requires commitment to learn a suite of tools and APIs, but this gets you close and personal with the mobile platform. You can directly leverage the built-in features (multitouch, geolocation, sensors, etc).

Cross platforms frameworks
The main idea is to develop once and output to many platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Web browser). In this category, you will find Adobe Air, PhoneGap (now Apache Cordova), AppMobi, Tizzi, and many more. In general, these frameworks excel at working with the look of the interfaces, not so much how to connect things in the background, i.e. getting the accelerometer data from the mobile device. And trying to connect to hardware is often challenging or just plain impossible. Network protocols are easier to work with though.

Specific prototyping apps
Processing 2.0 (still in beta) has an Android mode to work on this mobile platform. It also has a javascript mode too, easing the development of projects for the larger web interworld. OpenFrameworks is now capable of building iOS and Android executables. Not all features are supported, but it is a joy to see that OF can now work on mobile platforms.

Are you using Flash to prototype IxD projets on mobile devices? How will you adapt your practice? Will you miss it?

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