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.
