Adobe Flash Sneeks Its Way Onto Apple iPad

Los Angeles — iPad owners who are intensely upset that Apple and Adobe, once friends, have since become enemies over Steve Job’s refusal to incorporate Flash into any of his might soon have a solution. An enterprising iOS hacker behind the Spirit jailbreak for iPad and iPhone has followed up with a build of Adobe’s Flash has proven that with a little work, Flash will work just fine on the iPad and iPhone, as long as you are comfortable jailbreaking your device.

The jailbreak app, nicknamed “Frash,” will let users watch Flash web videos on their iPads when installed. The program is in fact a port of the official Adobe Flash plug-in that is already available for Android devices.

Comex, the force behind the Sprint untethered jailbreak tool, has developed an unofficial workaround that users can install in order to access Flash-based content through the iPad’s default Safari web browser.

“Frash can currently run most Flash programs natively in the Mobile Safari browser,” said Comex, which also developed the Spirit untethered jailbreak tool for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch,  in the description for the YouTube video created to show the hack in action.

Performance is actually pretty decent, and certainly this will come as a surprise to Mr. Jobs, which notably dismissed Flash as a dying format using the excuse that it was too much of a battery drain for the Apple tablet. However, it will only work on a jailbroken iPad which the majority of buyers probably would not be fussed about.

Frash will currently only function on the iPad, but there are plans to port it to the iPhone as well. Only the 3GS and iPhone 4 would be supported, obviously for performance reasons.

The poster of the video says that Frash will be released when it is stable, and that keyboard and video support are being worked on. However, for video to work it would “require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone.”

Here’s a video of Frash in action:

In the above YouTube video, Comex explained: “Frash uses a multi-process model similar to Chrome on the desktop, so a crash in the Frash/Flash plugin does not take down the browser.”

Apple has blocked developers from using Adobe Flash in any of applications for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and has discontinued support for Flash content on its devices, claiming that Flash slows down the processor and causes crashes.