Enabling Flash on Android,
how to make it work

One of Teleca's engineers recently undertook the task of getting the latest version of Flash Lite to work on Google's Android. The demo was implemented as a browser plug-in, enabling Flash content to be displayed in Android's web kit-based browser. This mirrors the plug-in on HTC's Hero device, which (contrary to some reports) is using Flash Lite 3.1 to provide the Flash support in the browser.

The Android browser supports the common NPAPI plug-in interface which was originally developed for the Netscape browsers many years ago. Most (non-Microsoft) browsers still use this interface for their plug-ins and Teleca has experience of creating Flash plug-ins using this interface on several different platforms.

While regular Android applications are written in Java, the underlying operating system is based on Linux. The Flash plug-in is an example of Linux development for Android -- it is written in C++ and forms part of the Android build system that builds the full software image to be flashed onto a device. In order to include Flash in this build system we needed to create custom Android make-files that instruct the build system how to build the Flash code. The end result of this is a Linux shared library for Flash but at this stage nothing on the Android system knows what to do with it.

The next step is to write middleware code to turn this library into a plug-in that the browser will be able to load and talk to. The plug-in API functions allow the browser to load the plug-in into its own thread and to discover what type of data the plug-in claims to support. In this case our plug-in says it supports Flash content and so whenever the browser finds Flash embedded within a webpage it will pass it to our plug-in. It took only two weeks to get the Flash plug-in up and running and displaying Flash animations within the browser in the SDK emulator on a PC. Soon after (thanks to Google's generosity in giving out free Ion development phones) the same plug-in was shown to work well on the real device, providing a much more portable demonstration of Teleca's Flash and Android skills.

Enabling Flash content within the browser brings the full web experience to your mobile phone and can also be used for a massive range of games and animations already in existence for PCs and for handsets.

If you want to see a demo or would like to know more about Teleca’s integration of Flash Lite onto Android or other OS, please contact solutions@teleca.com

Note: Flash, Flash Lite are trademarks by Adobe. Android is a trademark by Google