Rejoice comrades! Gone are the days of smug Android users lauding their Flash Players at us. Adobe has just announced that Flash Player will no longer be updated for new device configurations, and will no longer be supported on any Android devices beyond Android 4.0x. Adobe is looking to focus on using Flash for web-based gaming and premium copy-protected video.

Flash Player is one of the most popular applications on the Google Play store, and since the beginning of the mobile Flash Player, it has been one of Android’s greatest selling points, perhaps more significantly in the war between the iPad and its competitors.

Ironically, Flash has been pulled because the plug-in was likely to exhibit “unpredictable behaviour” when paired with Jelly Bean. That sounds a lot like something the late entrepreneur and prophet Steve Jobs once said. When Flash was first released for mobile platforms Jobs claimed that supporting Flash would jeopardise battery life, performance and security. In fact, you could say it would lead to “unpredictable behaviour”…

Apple threw its lot in with HTML 5, a decision perhaps backed up by Youtube’s decision to use HTML 5 for its videos. Having announced the decision, Adobe admitted that HTML 5 was:

“the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms”

As you can imagine, this has caused a lot of anger amongst the Android community. One user described the move as “commercial suicide”, another said:

“Flash was the reason I bought a Galaxy Tab instead of iPad! I can’t believe Adobe and Google would do this.”

Another user commented:

“This is the single biggest difference between the Android and iOS web experience. Seemingly half the web is still based on Flash, and my device is now powerless to view any of that content.”

Now that this decision has been finalized, it will be interesting to see how the landscape of mobile content changes. Of course, the change won’t be immediate, because there are only 8 phones that can actually run versions of Android beyond 4.0, two of those are contraband because of patent disputes, and the rest are scarce to say the least… seriously, these phones are rarer than Nickelback hits.

Do you think that Apple’s decision to back HTML 5 was simply a question of backing the right horse? Or has Apple’s decision directly forced this change?

Leave your comments below!

@TiP_Stephen

Via: BBC