Flash Player for iPhone/iPad - Frash Review

Flash Player for iPhone/iPad - Frash Review
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Introduction

Frash for jailbroken iOS devices is made possible by Comex. The iPhone jailbreak hacker has ported over Flash Player 10.1 for Android to the iPhone. Frash is in the early beta stage but is quite usable for many websites when you need to have Flash working in a pinch. Today we will take a look at the installation and setup process, using Frash, and how well it works on the web.

Installation and Requirements

frash on cydia

To download and install Frash, you first need a jailbroken iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. More specifically, it only works on the following jailbroken devices due to hardware limitations and performance issues:

  • iPhone 3GS
  • iPhone 4
  • iPod Touch 3rd Generation
  • iPod Touch 4th Generation
  • iPad

Installation

1. Start Cydia, > Manage tab > Sources

2. Edit > Add

3. Enter https://repo.benm.at

4. Choose Frash – Flash for iOS and Install

Frash Toggle for SBSettings Flash Player

Frash will now always be running. To control this, you should also install Frash Toggle for SBSettings in the same Cydia Repository. This is optional, but has been shown to save battery life. Note that every time Frash is toggled on or off, the Safari browser restarts.

Features (3 out of 5)

flash safari

Frash will now function within Safari and in other applications where Flash content is presented (such as in Cydia via advertisements). To use Frash, simply click on the grey squares that say “Flash” and it will begin to load. While playing animations, basic websites, and movies, Frash works almost perfectly. For interacting with the Flash content, it’s not as smooth and refined.

Usability and Usefulness (3 out of 5)

flash game

Before you get overly excited about having Flash Player on your iDevice, you should be warned that this is version 0.2 and therefore very buggy and quite limited. It’s great for things like advertisements, small flash websites, and some videos and games. It is terrible for watching most Flash videos, many Flash games, and large Flash websites. These either take a long time to load, do not display correctly, or crash Safari. While playing some Flash games which rely on the mouse to click and drag things, you will end up dragging your browser around instead of the Flash content. For buttons within Flash, it works just fine. The bottom line is that Frash is not ready for primetime.

Frash does not even begin to compare to the official Flash Player 10.1 for Android, which is nicely optimized, and designed for the Android browser and a mobile device’s interface (without a mouse and keyboard). It would be nice to have a similar official version from Adobe to fully interact with Flash content and work as it was meant to. In the mean time, the usefulness of Frash is quite limited and only good when you need to have Flash in a pinch.

Conclusion (4 out of 5)

Frash represents a major step forward in getting a fully functional Flash Player on iOS. It’s far from perfect and not nearly as good as the official Flash Player for Android or other mobile devices, but it will likely improve with time. It’s definitely worth the easy install and you can always toggle it on or off and select only the Flash content you want to load to save on bandwidth and page load times.