Will apple continue to struggle with flash, or find their own solution?

Apple is not struggling with flash, they simply do not want it in its current form on their products... simple as that. Apple supports and contributes to an open standard alternative using Webkit as the platform. Webkit on Mac OS X and iOS allow developers to create web applications and functionality with HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS, along with extensions that allow a developer to make applications similar to native ones. This is Apple's solution, and it's based on open projects and specs, unlike flash, allowing Apple to have control over it.

Webkit is Apple's open source web platform used as the web browser engine on iOS, Android, Symbian, and RIM's nex-gen Blackberry OS. It is also on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, Syllable, haiku, Amiga, MorphOS, AROS, and many others.

WebOS, Palm's and now HP's mobile OS platform, is actually based on top of Webkit. Google's Chrome OS is also a Webkit based OS using Linux as the kernel.

www.webkit.org

As long as Steve Jobs is at Apple, there will be no flash on iOS devices. I fret the day when my favorite company let's my least favorite product inside of their operating system. When Apple let's Flash in iOS, is the day that they'll regret.

Apple is not struggling with flash its just that flash is a cpu, gpu, and ram hog. Try playing a flash video while watching the task manager or activity manager and what how much the cpu spikes.

I think in the future its possible that they will switch to HTML5 on Mac OSX. The iOS 4 devices will stay with HTML5 and will never get flash.

When I saw flash eating up %80 of a 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo while playing an interactive object on a website, I saw why Apple likes to stay away from it. If it did that to my friend's iMac I can't even imagine what it would do to my iPad.. let alone iPhone.

Flash sucks but it is widely used because just about every single web browser old and new supports it.

On my PC, flash can use 30% CPU usage just to play 1080P content from youtube.

But using vlc player, I can watch a 15GB 1 hour 1080P movie and only have it take 6-10% CPU usage

For flash to work, it needs to give up on old content and be remade from the ground up to have full hardware acceleration and also be more efficient to a point when it is no different than a normal video player.

until then, it will cause problems.

While it sucks that it is not on a mobile device, I can see the reason why it is not on them.

On my windows mobile based pocket PC, my battery life of web browsing is on average 7-8 hours on a single charge (max backlight 2880mAh battery), If I was to watch flash video for example going through a couple of episodes of anime on instantz.net) I am lucky to get 3 hours battery life.

But with wifi off and watching anime using tcpmp (basically vlc for the windows mobile) I can do around 12-15 hours video playback

Flash is very inefficient, the only reason why people want it is because everyone is using it on their websites. While HTML 5 can also do video, it is still heavy on the CPU usage compared to just playing a video using using VLC player

PS for those who have mobile devices that support multiple video formats, it is good to run a program like task manager and check which formats allow for hardware acceleration. Depending on the device, the onboard videocard may provide hardware acceleration and if it does, converting videos to that format can nearly double your battery life while playing video.

Well, they'll struggle with flash and implement HTML5 where they can because it would be a waste of time them developing their own alternative and even if they did I do not personally think it would catch on