Should I wait for Flash Player 10.1 or go with Flash Lite 3 to develop Flash content for mobile phones and devices

Question

Adobe are launching Flash Player 10.1 in the first quarter of 2010, this will provide consistent runtime across desktops and mobile devices (so I assume if it was built for the web it will work on the mobile).

I am about to start developing an flash based application for mobile phones, should I look at using FLash Lite 3 or wait until Flash Player 10.1 comes out. I guess I could have my flash lite 3 app out there in a couple of months by which time Flash Player 10.1 will be coming very soon. Is it valid to say that the majority of handsets out there now support Flash Lite 3 and may not support Flash Player 10.1 or will all handsets be able to use Flash Player 10.1 when it comes out? What share of the market will this release affect?

I will still want to optimise my Flash 10 for web application to run on Flash Player 10.1 to make it perform better on a mobile browser so this is still potentially just as much work as building a standalone Flash Lite 3 app. Or do I not need to optimise at all - will Flash Player 10.1 deliver the same experience on a mobile browser?

Will Flash Player 10.1 offer the same feature set such as being able to browse files on a mobile and upload to the web?

anything else to consider here?

Answer 1

Just start working on it and make something usable. You will discover a lot of details that are not even related to the technology you are using. Once you have something that is working, you can consider migrating to a better(?) technology and see if it is really worth.

Answer 2

There are two perspectives to take here:

1. There is little to no downside to targeting Flash Lite 3 right now in that Flash Player 10.1 should have no trouble playing back content built in that way.
2. Flash Lite 3 is written entirely in ActionScript 2 which provides inferior performance, convoluted language composition, and conventions that promote bad programming style. On top of that, your existing FP10 project would likely need a substantial code rewrite.

This is also a question of what exactly your content and target audience require/suggest. Only you know your audience of handhelds and physical functional requirements.

All things considered, I would promote Flash Player 10.1 as you get a much better language along with it and much easier feature-parity between the versions of your app.

As for your other concerns (your current site and feature set), you certainly do need to take a look at the memory footprint of your FP10 SWF that is currently live on the web to see if it can even be run in a low memory environment and more FP10.1 info can be found here regarding features.