Adobe is getting ready to launch Flash 10.1 on Android and several other mobile OSes. They are promising to deliver a unified platform for awesome (but according to Apple not magical enough) games and applications. The whole idea is to have one tool/development environment for all those platforms, but there are some interesting details behind, that not many people noticed so far and those little details are usually crucial for success.

Flash 10.1 for mobile devices will finally support RTMP/RTMPT for streaming media, but unfortunately only from the server to the clients. All those real-time video streaming applications will not be able to use the same infrastructure they are using to stream from webcams in real-time on the web.

In addition to that application developers will not be able to access cameras and microphones on mobile devices for any kind of operation. The lack of access to the camera means that developers will be unable to develop Augmented Reality (AR) applications by using Flash. This is a pity since AR is a really hot area that could have given the Flash platform an additional appeal, especially because most of the consumer targeted AR applications on the web is done in Flash with the FLAR toolkit

I certainly hope the boost in interest and the heavy hype around AR will make camera and microphone access on mobile devices a priority for Adobe. Until then we will just need to keep writing native applications.

p.s.: it would be a dream to have this functionality straight in HTML‘s JS API, but I think my beard is going to be quite long before we will get it.