With the growth of Apple, your flash is wasted

Filed in Coding Tips on Mar.19, 2011 By Keith Lunt

Have you recently looked through your website stats to see just how many people are accessing your website using Apple technology?

Ignore those on Apple Macs – test for Safari and they are happy. But count up the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad hits. On one site that I looked at recently mobile devices accounted for 20% of hits, and Apple devices the majority of these hits.

People are sitting on trains, in buses, waiting for children to finish their hobbies and so on and want something to do. A few presses of a screen and their iPhone is on the internet and they can be planning their lives.

That is why over the last year our website stats have gone from a tiny number of iPhone hits to a huge number. The technology is spreading, more people are aware of the advantages and the internet access is cheap. I even now of someone (who is a technical guy), who has cancelled his broadband connection in favour of mobile technology.

So what’s the big problem then with maybe 10% – 20% of our visitors arriving via IOS devices? Well, there is a huge problem, if you are using certain technologies.

For whatever reason, Steve Jobs and Apple refuse to implement Flash technology into IOS devices. If your website runs entirely in flash, or uses Flash navigation bars, then those people accessing it via their IOS device are not going to get the experience you want. In fact, at the extreme they won’t see the website at all.

At the very best, if you have used Flash for a banner that is key to your design then the pages aren’t going to look as impressive as they should do. And when someone sees that a bit of your website doesn’t work on their IOS device, are they going to switch to another device, continue anyway or maybe go elsewhere?

Personally, I would rather not take the chance. Potentially losing 20% of traffic just because I want a Flash animation is not worth it and I suspect as the technology gets cheaper more people will be using IOS devices to access websites.

So, what are our choices? Well we can scrap flash totally. Flash written websites are a bad idea anyway, so rewrite them and they will become search engine friendly.

But do you need to rewrite a website if it has flash banners or navigation? You could do, but the gains are probably not worth the effort. It would be more efficient to just provide a suitable non-flash alternative – links in basic HTML and a jpg or a gif banner to replace the Flash banner.

It is easy enough to do and if it means that you rescue up to 20% of your visitors, then why not?