Wednesday 30 May 2012

The easy way to run flash on iPhone/iPad - the secret revealed!

After a lot of research I have concluded that the only way to "run" flash on an iPhone or iPad, without cracking/jailbreaking your Apple device which invalidates its warranty, is to install a native remote pc app on your apple device and point the app at a pc running the required flash applications. Sadly you must abandon any idea of some kind of "flash emulator" actually running on your IOS device - its not available.

This "remote access to a PC running flash" approach is very easy to set up and it works surprisingly well. Also there are a host of good remote pc apps in the apple store - many of which are free. This is really geared to you demonstrating how a flash app would look  on your Apple IOS device and I would not recommend it for heavy or day-to-day usage.

There is also the native cloud browse app which makes it even easier for you by hosting a firefox session on a remote server pc for you and seems to work well also. However be aware that spending your $2.99 on cloud browse only buys you an "add-supported service" with a maximum session time of 10 minutes plus 1 days free trial of the service you perhaps thought you were buying. From the cloud browse user reviews in the app store most people feel somewhat cheated that this was not made clearer when they purchased. Hard to play flash games with this kind of restriction!

Alternatively you could totally avoid all these attempts by Apple to control what you run on your device and the dodgy antenna cover-ups etc and buy an android phone or tablet. I am currently evaluating "the Chinese iPad" - a 10 inch android tablet at one third of the price of an iPad - but that's another article.......

Ken Thompson (aka The BumbleBee) blogs about bioteams, virtual collaboration and business simulation at www.bioteams.com.