The truth about the iPhone, Flash video and battery life

Does playing Flash video really sap an iPhone's battery life? We find out using our exclusive set of tests.

By Alan Lu, 20 Jan 2011 at 17:11

One of the most bitter and unresolved disputes in the technology industry is the war of words between Apple and Adobe over the issue of Flash Player and the iPhone. Most online videos are encoded in Flash, but the iPhone (and other iOS devices such as the iPad and iPod Touch) don't support it. Why not?

In an open letter back in April 2010, Apple chief executive (CEO) Steve Jobs listed several reasons why Apple has declined to include a version of Flash Player on the iPhone. One of them was the claim that Flash videos drain a smartphone's battery more quickly than videos in Apple's favoured H.264 format.

In response, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen called Jobs' list of technical issues a 'smokescreen'. He specifically stated that Jobs' concerns about Flash's effect on battery life 'patently false'.

Since Flash Player isn't publicly available for the iPhone (if it exists at all), it's difficult to tell who's right. Nonetheless, we decided to undertake our own series of tests to find out what effect playing Flash video has on the battery life of an iOS device and our results will surprise you.

What's At Stake

The spat between Apple and Adobe could have big implications for the tech industry.

Apple's favouring of H.264 over Flash has helped increase the popularity of H.264. For example, YouTube has converted its entire library to H.264 for playback on iOS devices. If Apple's claims about Flash's effect on battery life are true, then Flash's popularity could decline as smartphones and other similar mobile devices, such as tablets, become more popular.

In a wider context, if Apple is right, then Flash, one of Adobe's primary products is severely unsuited, for a growing, and potentially huge number of mobile computing devices. The company could therefore lose out financially unless it embraces Flash alternatives.

If Adobe is right, then Apple's policy of strictly controlling its products is seriously flawed by denying its iOS customers use of a popular technology that is available on rival Android devices.

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2 comments

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It's my iPhone not Apple's

The most reasonable deductions from the tests are that
1)VLC is a dog and is energy wasteful in playing both formats. Since the VLC times are so similar it's likely that Apple engineers could write a Flash player which ran for as long as their H.264 player.

2) The andriod results only show a 7% hit on battery life using Flash which doesn't seem a lot to shout about.

The debate is misconceived in any case. I if want to shorten the battery life on my phone by running power-hungry software that's my business and nothing to do with Steve Jobs. Once it's is purchased it is my iPhone not Apple's. Steve Jobs et al seem to have real problems with this basic concept.

By Ip_Newsletters5c on Friday Jan 21

The technical difference

Native H.264 video playback uses hardware decoding to improve performance on both Apple and most Android phones - it's pretty much standard in mobile GPUs.

VLC, on the other hand, is likely to be doing software decoding - hence the worse battery life. Even with a more programmable GPU it still wouldn't help if the video hardware acceleration is H.264 only.

Flash video playback will use hardware acceleration where it can - I don't know enough about the specifics of each Android device to know where it is / isn't used - depends on what the hardware supports.

But - all this presupposes that the main thing Jobs was complaining about was Flash video support.

My experience with Flash/Flex development is that there are a lot of other areas where there were problems - high CPU and memory usage, memory leaks, etc.

At the same time, I don't wholly blame the Flash engineering team for that. Flash was never really intended as an application development tool, but I can just imagine some non-technical manager seeing an opportunity for Java 2.0.

What the Flash team have done in the last 3 years has been pretty amazing, but it's been 12-18 months behind what was advertised. Again, I'm not going to beat them up on that - I'm sure every developer has been dropped in it by a promise made by sales.

But fundamentally, I still don't think it's quite up to the job. When Jobs tried to sell HTML 5 as an alternative to the native SDK used by their own apps, we smelled a rat. When Adobe sell Flash/AIR as a solution to developers, no one wonders why their own applications are native.

By JulesLt on Friday Jan 28