How Important Is Flash Anyway?

Few weeks ago we published a short poll trying to figure out how important is Flash to the readers of MobilityDigest and The Mobile Spoon.

The answers were a bit surprising as I knew many people will say they want it, but the numbers turned out to be really high.

Over 60% of the people who voted indicated that they want Flash, around 20% answered they do not need it.

Today I saw an interesting post over at MobileCrunch saying that Flash for Android hits 1 million downloads.
It’s a high number, but the calculations that MobileCrunch were doing gave them interesting numbers:

"If we use the numbers we know to be true (roughly 500k Android phones sold in 2008, 7.7 million in 2009, 100k per day from Jan to May 2010, and 200k per day from June on), we can estimate that at least 41.2 million Android handsets are floating around. More generous estimates put the platform at around 50 million units pushed."

50 million units. Amazing numbers no doubt. Around 15 million of them running the latest Android OS (2.2) which is compatible with Flash, out of which, 1 million handsets now have Flash. 

Not bad, but absolutely not even close to the 60% that indicated in our poll that they will want it…
I guess not all of them own an Android phone running version 2.2…