Does playing swf in Android2.2 requires an external Flash Player to be installed?

Question

I would like to use swf animations in my application. 1. Is it possible to do so without Adobe Flash Player installed, using a library for example? 2. If so, how? If not, is there a way to check that the player is installed or "mark" it as required? 3. Should it work on the emulator?

Found my answers here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4617138/detect-if-flash-is-installed-on-android-and-embed-a-flash-video-in-an-activity and here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5243261/integrating-embedding-flash-in-android-applications-possible — Asaf Pinhassi, May 27 '12 at 18:30

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 27 '12 at 20:09

Yes You can use swf animation on android, the way this works consist on:

creating an html page in wich you play the swf, then opening the html in a webview component

You should first check if Flash is installed this snippet can help you:

boolean flashInstalled = false;
try {
  PackageManager pm = getPackageManager();
  ApplicationInfo ai = pm.getApplicationInfo("com.adobe.flashplayer", 0);
  if (ai != null)
    flashInstalled = true;
} catch (NameNotFoundException e) {
  flashInstalled = false;
}

By using the PackageManager you can obtain the Application Info for the Flash Player package. It will throw an exception if such a package doesn't exist.

After that you can display a Flash video to play your animation within your Activity by embedding it within a WebView.

If your check in Part 1 returns false, best practice would be to hide your WebView and replace it with either an error message explaining the requirement for Flash, or better still, a link to download the Flash plugin from the Android Market.

yes you can test it on emulator after installing Flash app on it!!

Does playing swf in Android2.2 requires an external Flash Player to be installed?

1 Answers1