An app developer has sparked some debate with a blog post titled ‘Flash outperforms HTML5 on mobile devices,” which notes that an Android-powered Nexus One could achieve a 57 frames per second rate when rendering a simple animation using Flash, compared with 40 frames per second using HTML5. In addition, the HTML5 app consumed twice the battery life of the Flash version, which is a significant consideration for power-limited mobile devices. In both cases, the test used browser-based applets rather than code transformed into a native app, because HTML5 cannot currently be exported as a native app for Android, and otherwise the test would not be comparing like-with-like.

Some posters to the original blog noted different performances from other devices, with the gap substantially narrowed in some cases, although some reiterated the results of the initial test. It was also suggested that the code used in the HTML5 app was inefficient; and that the test actually measured browser performance rather than differences with the core HTML or Flash implementations.

The test was deemed significant as it addresses an important issue for developers: the ability to use a technology such as HTML5 or Flash to deliver applications across device platforms, without the need to port to support different operating systems. While Flash is something of a known quantity in the PC world, the test shows how it could also be a more suitable tool for mobile than HTML5, which is gaining traction as a way to deliver code that can be run on multiple devices. However, HTML 5 has some benefits, not least of which is support from Apple for the delivery of content to iOS devices – although this lead has been somewhat narrowed following Apple’s decision to allow Flash content packaged as native applications on the iPhone.

Currently, HTML5 is being evolved to support more and more features, which should enable it to become a more widely adopted alternative to native apps. In our recent Focus article, Mark Watson, CEO of Volantis, argues that HTML5 offers “an easier and safer way to write applications for mobile phones compared to a system programming language such as Java.”