Flash Mobile Downloaded 1 Million Times: Success Or Failure?Flash Mobile Downloaded 1 Million Times: Success Or Failure?

ZDNet on Thursday reported that Flash Player Mobile 10.1 for Android reached the one-million-downloads milestone. The Android Market only confirms that the application has been downloaded more than 250,000 times, but let's assume for the moment that ZDNet's number is right.

Should Adobe be cheering, or cowering? To determine that, we need to put things into perspective.

First, exactly how many Android handsets are out there? This is what we know. About 0.5 million Android handsets were sold in 2008. Another 7.7 million were sold in 2009. Solid numbers for 2010 don't exist yet, but we can make some assumptions. Google has said during the course of the year that it was selling 60,000, then 66,000, then 100,000, then eventually 200,000 Android handsets per day.

Take all these numbers and they tally up to a total of a little over 41 million Android handsets. To make things look (slightly) better for Adobe, let's round that down to an even 40 million.

Not each of those 40 million handsets is capable of running Flash. Remember, Flash requires Android 2.2. According to Google, the number of handsets running Android 2.2 is about 30% of the total. Thirty percent of 40 million is 12 million.

So, of 12 million potential customers, Adobe has reached 1 million, or about 8.33%. Flash was first made available to the Nexus One in late May, followed by the Motorola Droid, Droid Incredible, Droid X, and HTC EVO 4G throughout August and September.

Why haven't more Android users downloaded Flash? It's received an insane amount of media coverage, and both Google and Adobe talked it up to no end when it first debuted with Android 2.2 earlier this year. Does the general user care about Flash, or is it something only the tech-minded truly care about? Based on the numbers, we have to assume the latter.

The bigger question is, what does this bode for Flash's future? If the software isn't going to be downloaded and used by more than 90% of Android users, what's to keep developers interested in creating Flash-based content? It would appear to be wasted effort.

This is something that will need to be monitored over time as more Android 2.2 Froyo devices hit the market and (hopefully) Flash is made available natively on handsets without requiring an additional download.

[Via ZDNet and MobileCruch]