Flash Ported to iPad by Spirit Jailbreak Author

The author of the Spirit jailbreak for iOS devices has successfully ported the Android version of Flash over to the iPad, demonstrating that Apple’s tablet is well capable of handling such content, although it remains to be seen whether battery life is, indeed, affected as much as Apple claimed.

The Android flash port is dubbed Frash by comex, the developer of Spirit, a simple jailbreak tool similar to the iPhone Dev Team’s redsn0w application. A YouTube video has been posted to demonstrate the feat. An insightful description is provided by uploader “Xuzz149”, who notes that “Frash is a port of the Adobe Flash runtime for Android to the iPhone, using a compatibility layer, by comex ( http://twitter.com/comex ). Frash can currently run most Flash programs natively in the MobileSafari browser. Frash currently only runs on the iPad, but support for other devices (3GS+ only due to technical restrictions) is planned, as well as support for iOS 4.”

The description continues, with Xuzz149 revealing that comex is planning to roll out the final version of his Flash port whenever he achieves a stable form. The developer is eager to get the show on the road, inviting developer types to join his efforts at http://github.com/comex/frash.

“Frash uses a multi-process model similar to Chrome on the desktop, so a crash in the Frash/Flash plugin doesn't take down the browser,” Xuzz149 outlines. “You can see this while I'm playing Alien Hominid: the ad above crashed (probably a Frash bug), but Safari stays open just fine, and continues to play other Flash content on the page.”

“Video and keyboard input are currently not supported,” he explains. “The former will require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone, but the latter should be reasonably easy to implement.” The description ends with Xuzz149 noting that the video was shot and edited using iMovie on iPhone 4.