Not for the faint of heart or for the battery conservers out there… If you’re familiar with SSH and willing to jailbreak your iPhone 4 and potentially void your warranty, an unauthorized ported version of Flash is now available for the iPhone 4. The software was created by porting the Flash 10.1 from Android Froyo and it is considered Alpha by the programmer so expect lots of crashes and bugs and of course no Flash video. So now that we know that Flash exists on the iPhone, is it useable?

Smokescreen is a new open source Javascript and HTML5 library that enables Flash SWF files to run without the Flash plugin. This opens up the possibility of enabling backwards compatibility for Flash ads and animations on the iPhone and iPad where a plugin is not available. Of course any non-native approach will run more slowly and it seems video will still need to be native HTML5 but it does make things interesting as Flash legacy code can now be run in the new HTML5 space without a Flash browser plug-in.

Android OS, Google’s Linux-based mobile phone operating system 2.2 named “Froyo” (for frozen yogurt, keeping with the alphabetical dessert naming scheme), supports a new mobile Flash (not Flash Lite, not desktop Flash) that in theory enables flash to run on the Android platform, albeit a little slowly. Non mobile optimized Flash stutters the most on the new system but newly coded optimized Flash runs smoothly. Some video does not play at all due to licensing restrictions. This makes us wonder, if you’re going to retool why not use the new up and coming technology standard of HTML5 rather than the legacy Flash standard that’s clearly on it’s way out?