In an official announcement from Adobe, we learned last week that Adobe will be ending new installations of its Flash Player for Android devices. Come August 15, you will no longer be able to find Adobe’s Flash on Google Play. After August 15, you will still be able to update Flash if it has been previously installed, but if you don’t get it before then, you’re out of luck! Adobe will no longer be developing Flash beyond its current version and will end its support of the current version in the near future. In addition, future versions of Google Chrome will not even come with native support of in-browser Flash.
Instead, the company will be focusing on making sure its products successfully transition to HTML5 environments. We’ve seen this coming for quite some time now, and it’s not necessarily the fault of Apple refusing to include Flash support in iOS. Flash’s development never really kept up with the transition to the mobile environment — with less beefy processors, the (as yet to be penetrated) battery wall and the weak security of Flash. The shift away from Flash will help mitigate the current security risks inherent on Android devices … or at least allow a more narrow focus.
