Update: There’s now an easier method for installing Flash on a jailbroken iDevice. See below.
There’s good news and bad news for iPhone users who have been hoping to get Adobe Flash up and running on their phones. The good news is you can do it now. The bad news is that it only works on iOS 4 and you need to jailbreak your device.
Oh yeah, more bad news:
- Flash for the iPhone isn’t supported by Apple or Adobe.
- There’s no support for video streaming yet.
- It’s not even called Flash at this point, but rather “Frash.”
- Installation is kind of a pain at this point, even if your phone is already jailbroken.
- Frash for iOS 4 is only available as an alpha right now, so it might not be all that stable/
- Since the iPhone wasn’t designed with Flash in mind (or vice versa), this will probably wreak havoc on your battery life.
But if you really, really want to play Farmville on your phone or view Flash-based ads on web sites, you can do it now. It looks like the hacker who ported Flash to run on iOS has made a sort of Flash-on-demand feature, which means your web browser will tell you when it encounters Flash content and you have to tap the screen to see Flash. This should allow web sites to load much more quickly than if you left Flash enabled all the time.
Blogger Grant Pannell has posted detailed instructions for installing Frash on the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPod touch 3G, or iPad. And if you want to see Frash in action on an iPhone 4, check out the video after the break, courtesy of Redmond Pie.
Update: OK, it looks like there’s an easier way to install Flash/Frash on an iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, Ipod touch 3G, and iPad. You simply need to:
- Open the Cydia app on your jailbroken device
- Click the Manage button, and then select Sources
- Tap the Edit button and then select Add
- Add “http://repo.benm.at” (without the quotation marks
- Search for Frash and click the Install button.
via Engadget, Comex, and Gizmodo
