Adobe Pulls Flash for Android From Google Play Store

Adobe will pull its Flash Player plugin from Google’s Android marketplace, marking the end of what was once touted as a key advantage of Android over Apple’s iOS.

As we reported earlier, Google’s new Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” marks the end of the line for Adobe’s certified version of mobile Flash Player. While the move shouldn’t have been a huge surprise since Adobe already announced last year that it would cease development of its mobile Flash Player, it’s still bad news for those that wanted an official version of the Flash Player on a Jelly Bean phone.

And now Adobe has limited access to Flash in the Google Play Store to any phone on this list of certified devices. For everyone else Flash on Android is a thing of the past.

The reasoning behind Adobe’s decision to pull Flash from the Google Play store is that any devices that don’t have Flash Player installed out of the box are, in Adobe’s words, “increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player.”

There is a way around the new limitations if you’re a developer who needs access to Flash (or, presumably, a user who doesn’t mind hacking your phone): Flash Player for Android will remain available in Adobe’s archive of released Flash Player versions. It’s also worth noting that when we first wrote about the end of Flash on Google Play a number of readers let us know that the Flash plugin actually does seem to work with Android 4.1, so if you’ve just got to have it, head to the archives and give it a shot. 

Source :  webmonkey.com/