As of yesterday, Adobe’s Flash player browser plugin for Android is no longer available to new users in the Google Play Store. Adobe is limiting access to the plugin as the company works to deprecate Flash on mobile devices.
Development on the plugin largely halted last year when Adobe gutted its mobile Flash player strategy amid major layoffs. The last version of the plugin isn’t compatible with Android 4.1 or Google Chrome for Android, making it a non-starter on future Android devices.
Adobe revealed in June that new users would be blocked from installing the plugin on Android after August 15. As promised, the company took steps yesterday that rendered the Flash Player plugin inaccessible in the Google Play Store to users who don’t already have it installed.
Flash suffers from performance, security, and stability problems that Adobe has been too slow to correct. These weaknesses make it a poor fit for the mobile Web. Although Adobe had some success in making Flash work properly on Android, the quality of the user experience wasn’t consistent across the spectrum of mobile devices and platforms. Apple’s decision to block the Flash player plugin on its iOS platform was also a major impediment to Adobe’s original ambitions for mobile Flash.
Flash’s relevance is declining, but it still has a role to play on mobile devices—albeit outside of the Web browser. Adobe adapted its Flash tools so that developers can use the technology to build native mobile applications. Adobe has gradually shifted its mobile Web content tooling strategy to focus on HTML5 and modern standards-based Web technologies.
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