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Comment by teyc | Hacker News Reader

Speaking from a technical standpoint, since Flash is a VM, and it's running on top of Dalvik, wouldn't performance necessarily be poor?

If anyone knows a little more about how Flash works on the mobile, please share.

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I believe the Android Flash plugin uses native code. You aren't forced to run on Dalvik on Android - Google released a Native Development Kit that includes GCC.

wouldn't NDK require a very recent version of Android? There are a lot out there which are still on 2.2.

2.2 would be the version that Flash was introduced.

Flash runs as a plugin inside the webkit based browser and webkit is native code in android since day one.

that also means that you cannot play local .SWF files on android unless you manage to get them inside a web page...

Flash can't run natively "on webkit." Flash file contains bytecode, which has to be either fully interpreted or JIT-ed. It has to be done on mobiles too. The interpreter or JIT-er has to be native. Writing native JIT-ers is hard, to have a native interpreter you can write it in C and recompile it for every platform but it will be significantly slower. In short, it's not easy to make the Flash fast on a new CPU. And no, Webkit is not a CPU.

To be fair, the Android Browser won't let you load local .html files either.

All Android apps are Java apps. The Android Browser is a thin Java app that uses JNI to load WebKit (which is native code). WebKit then loads the Flash native (which is also native code). Flash is running as native code, JIT'ing ActionScript, and (as necessary) calling back into Dalvik APIs using JNI.

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