While Flash on the iPhone and iPad certainly isn’t in the cards, it looks like it will be coming to Android even sooner than Google VP Andy Rubin said it would.
Mobile browser company Skyfire released version 2.0 today, which brings Flash video to Android along with a few other features.
The company says that it is aiming to create “the first Android browser built for the video-viewing generation but also the first mobile browser built for the Facebook generation, complete with a variety of social features” with this next version.
This new version will work on any Android version 1.6 and above and offers Flash video by transcoding it using the H.264 codec into HTML5 or into another format that your phone can understand. As the company noted in its email, “the HTML5 conversion is also promising as they intend to submit this product for iPhone fairly soon.”
Though, as we mentioned, we surely won’t be seeing native support for Flash on the iPhone, transcoding seems to be the way of Flash for mobile. Skyfire transcodes video “in the cloud”, compressing video by about 70% much in the way that Opera boosts its speeds by utilizing its servers as proxy servers. Opera recently opened the doors to other browsers on the iPhone, so Skyfire on the iPhone may too be a reality soon.
In addition to bringing Flash video to Android before the OS adopted native support, the new version of Skyfire brings media recommendations based on user browsing habits and integrated social network sharing. But obviously, the big feature it’s hoping catches on is its Flash video transcoding.
Before you go getting too excited, just make a note of the fact that Hulu has already gone and blocked Skyfire from accessing its video, but the company notes that Skyfire should play a “vast majority” of Flash videos on the Web.
