Adobe disables new installs of Flash Player for Android

Adobe Systems will disable new installs of its Flash Player plugin for Android beginning today, concurrently removing the app from the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Play storefront.

Adobe halted development of the browser-based Flash Player application runtime for mobile devices last year, shifting its efforts to native apps and the HTML5 web standard. The firm delivered an updated Flash Player optimized for Android 4.0, nicknamed Ice Cream Sandwich, but officially discontinued support for the operating system with the June 2012 introduction of Android 4.1, a.k.a. Jelly Bean.

"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," Adobe software quality engineer Tareq AlJaber wrote on the Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog earlier this summer. "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 Aug. 15."

Adobe's efforts to extend Flash's ubiquity from the desktop to the mobile platform suffered a fatal blow when late Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs famously announced the company's iOS mobile operating system would never support the runtime, blaming Flash as the culprit behind most Mac crashes. Apple even instituted a ban on cross-compiler translation tools like Adobe's Flash Professional CS5, which enabled developers to design and build iOS apps in Flash then convert their efforts to Apple-approved code.

Moving forward, Adobe will focus on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with its Adobe AIR runtime for all the major app stores. In October 2011, Adobe acquired Nitobi Software, creator of PhoneGap, an open-source development platform enabling programmers to build cross-platform apps written in HTML5 and JavaScript. PhoneGap technology has been used to create thousands of apps across Android, iOS, BlackBerry and other mobile platforms.

For more:
- read this CNet article

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