Why Doesn't the iPad Support Flash?

iPad

Updated March 06, 2017

The iPad does not and has never supported Flash. Steve Jobs famously wrote a letter detailing all of the reasons the iPhone and iPad did not support Flash. Mostly, the letter can be summed up as Flash simply not working very well on mobile devices.

Why doesn't the iPad support Flash?

First and foremost, Flash is a dead technology. While still widely used on the web, Flash already has a tombstone mounted in the graveyard.

We are just waiting for the date to be filled in so we can say some final words over the grave.

The death of Flash was inevitable. HTML is the markup language used to design websites. In the early days of the web, HTML was relatively simple, but as the web has grown over time, so has HTML. The most recent version -- HTML 5 -- has much broader support for graphics and video than the previous version, which makes Flash redundant.

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Flash lacks reliability

Flash has been pointed to as one of the most common culprits when a Mac crashes, which is one of the major reasons why Steve Jobs took a stand against Flash coming to the iOS platform. Flash also raises security concerns and has had performance issues on mobile devices.

Flash eats up the battery

Apple has always been very sensitive to the battery needs of its mobile devices. When implementing the Retina Display on the newest iPad, they expanded the battery to keep the same basic battery life even though the display required more power.

Adobe Flash for mobile devices has issues with eating up a lot of battery power, especially when compared to native apps built from the ground up for the iPad.

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Not designed for touch-based screens

Flash is designed for desktop and laptop PCs, which means it is designed for the same types of input found on these computers: keyboards and mice.

As a touch-based device, this would cause a poor user experience for iPad users trying to use a Flash-based website or play a Flash game.

Adobe dropped mobile support of Flash

And perhaps the biggest reason why we won't see Flash in the future comes not from Apple, but from Adobe. As Flash continued to have problems in the mobile market, and with the rise of HTML 5, the writing was on the wall. Adobe dropped support for mobile Flash and switched their support to HTML 5.

Is There Any Way to Run Flash on the iPad?

While Flash will technically not run on the iPad, there is a workaround for watching Flash video or playing Flash games on the iPad. Flash-enabled browsers like Photon download and interpret Flash on a remote server and stream the results to the iPad, allowing you to get around the restriction. This is not as good as native support, but in many cases, it is good enough.