Adobe says no Flash Player for Android 4.1
Plans to withdraw app on 15 August
TechLife | 29 Jun 2012 :
There will be no certified implementations of Adobe Systems' Flash Player for Android 4.1, and on 15 August the player will take a bow and no longer be available for download from Google's app store Play, Adobe said in blog post.
Adobe announced its plans to discontinue development of the Flash Player for mobile browsers last November, and is now revealing details of the timetable.
Analysis
Niall Kitson
TechCentral.ie
The end of Flash for Android marks the end of one of the mobile OS's main selling points over Apple's iOS. Is this a sign that Google thinks the mobile Web has moved on from Flash or is Adobe simply throwing in the towel lest it engage in a long and brutish battle to preserve its place in the market.
Only a few years ago Flash was persent on 95% of websites world wide. Now that open standards like HTML5 and H.264 are truly in the ascendant it looks about time for Adobe to cut its losses before it starts to look irrelevant.
There will be no certified version of Flash Player for Android 4.1, which was announced earlier this week at Google's I/O developer conference. The certification refers to the work Adobe does with smartphone and tablet vendors to ensure the software works correctly when pre-loaded on a device.
Beginning on 15 August, Adobe will also use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to limit continued access to Flash Player updates to those devices that already have the player installed - but only for older versions of Google's operating system. Once a device has been upgraded to Android 4.1, Adobe wants users to remove Flash Player. That's because the company hasn't continued developing and testing the application for this new version of Android and its browser options.
Still, users that today have a smartphone or tablet based on Android 4.0 or an older version of the operating system, and haven't installed the application are recommended to download it while they still can.
For developers, Adobe will instead concentrate on HTML5 and allowing them to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores.
IDG News Service