New York — Flash, an essential technological innovation of yesteryear is now losing it charms, and now it seems the days of Adobe’s omnipresent Player are numbered. As most mobile sites are rapidly transitioning to advanced platforms like HTML5 and Adobe AIR, Adobe on its blog revealed that it will not be developing Flash player for Android run devices in favor of HTML5, beginning with the limitation of updates to those who already have the download, before removing the app from Google Play in August.
Going by the post on Adobe’s official blog, this marks the end of Adobe Flash on Android mobile devices, and Adobe, back in February mentioned that Flash Player would not supported on 4.1 Jelly Bean version of Android and users should uninstall Flash Player prior to upgrading to Android 4.1.
As a matter of fact, Adobe Flash powers a lot of video content on the web, but this is gradually being replaced by the HTML 5 standard. And mobile devices perform better playing HTML 5 content than Adobe Flash. As a result, Android devices functioning on a version of the operating system beyond 4.0 will be barred from downloading the Flash Player from the Play store.
{japopup type=”iframe” content=”images/stories/demo/2012/July/android41-big.jpg” width=”1024″ height=”600″}
{/japopup}
Adobe Flash ends for Android 4.1, Jelly Bean… Click to enlarge…
Adobe posted a statement today that read:
“The Flash Player browser plugin integrates firmly with a device’s browser and multimedia subsystems (in ways that typical apps do not), and this necessitates integration by our device ecosystem partners. To ensure that the Flash Player provides the best possible experience for users, our partner program requires certification of each Flash Player execution. Certification includes extensive testing to ensure web content works as expected, and that the Flash Player provides a good user experience. Certified devices typically include the Flash Player pre-loaded at the factory or as part of a system update.”
Apart from many critics, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was notably dismissive of Flash and refused to allow the technology on the iOS platform. In 2010 he wrote a public letter outlining his thoughts on Flash and its problems with “reliability, security, and performance”. In particular he also cited problems with “battery life”.
Besides, Adobe in their attempt to stop the development of their Flash Player for Android, is modifying settings on Google’s Play Store, such that they are able to limit the number of devices downloading the software.
The reason given for this move is that Adobe is doubtful of authorizing users of Jelly Bean to download and continue using the software since it has not invested resources in ensuring that the Flash Player will work efficiently on the latest version of Android. They will have to test the software on a number of Android devices in the market to be certain that the software is functioning correctly on the Jelly Bean OS.
Moving forward, Adobe will be blocking Flash runtime downloads. “Beginning August 15th we will use the configuration settings in the Google Play Store to restrict 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.”
Skimming through Adobe documentation it is clear that Adobe is betting its future on Windows and Macs. There is no Flash for iOS, Flash will steadily die off on Android, and Adobe has no publicly announced plans to bring Flash to either Windows Phone 8 or Windows RT. For better or worse, Adobe has decided that Flash would not be playing a role on most mobile devices.
Well then, with no future upgrades available and those who install Jelly Bean are advised automatically by the app to uninstall the Player completely, it is a clearly an obligatory August fond farewell to Flash.