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June 29, 2012

Flash Player, No Longer Supported in Android Jelly Bean

As promised, Adobe announced that the Flash player app won't support Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). Adobe will continue to provide updates for the existing users, but starting from August 16 the Flash player app will no longer be available for new users in the Google Play Store.

"Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to only those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th," informs Adobe.

An obvious consequence is that "there will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1," so no Android Jelly Bean device will bundle the Flash player.

When you update to Android 4.1, the Flash player will still be installed, but Adobe recommends users to uninstall it because "the current version of Flash Player may exhibit unpredictable behavior". Some Jelly Bean users report that the Flash plugin still works well.

Now that Adobe's app will no longer support future Android versions and the mobile Chrome has no Flash support, Android will lose an important advantage and Flash's relevance will continue to diminish. It was a bumpy journey and, even though the user experience wasn't great, it was nice to know that you can open a page even if it uses Flash.

11 comments:

  1. Damn now I can't brag with "Android has Flash" anymore to iOS users :-(

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  2. I haven't even bothered to install Flash the past few times I've installed a new ROM. I won't miss it.

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  3. This is not surprising. Adobe already said they are pasing out flash and replacing it with HTML5 conversion tools.

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  4. Very disappointing, but a smart move for Adobe. Since Apple single handedly doomed Flash, it seems Adobe is going for the quick cash by making the html5 conversion tools and then obsoleting Flash. Of course it has been well documented that html5 is missing key features of Flash, etc. Screw Apple.

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  5. I won't miss flash at all. Good riddance. Don't worry the computing world will survive without it.

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  6. I would uninstall this bloody peace of software if I could but it is bundled in my Sony Ericsson with no rights to uninstall.

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  7. I don't understand why adobe is pulling it back entirely.. can't be that much work to keep it updated for android and with devices becomming more powerfull daily.. performance isn't really that much of a problem anymore.
    Ofc it drains the battery.. but hey that's the choice of the user.

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    1. Can't be that much work to keep it updated? There are around 4000 different android phone models, operating with many different browsers which are all just that little bit different to try and get the edge. Adobe has to certifiy flash for if not each device then at the very least each browser, this is a much more difficult job then trying to keep something updated for the 14 apple touch devices that have been released over the last 5 years....

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  8. Was Apple (Steve Jobs) right then? Glad that google has taken this step..

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  9. I have the RIGHT to keep Flash

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  10. Apple did not single handedly doom Flash.
    Apple is continuously losing market share because of scenarios like not supporting flash and its draconian stance on supporting anything that isnt apple.
    Adobe abbandoned flash because they are moving onto better coding, moving forward.
    Apple dictates nothing.

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