Gone in a Flash: Adobe Pulls Player From Google Store

Adobe’s capitulation on mobile Flash, which began last year with the announcement it would be scrapping further mobile Flash Player development, got real today with the official abandonment of the player on Google’s Android mobile OS.

Early this morning, Adobe dropped the Flash Player browser plugin from the Google Play store.

While pre-Jelly Bean versions of Android can continue to run Flash if it’s installed, and Jelly Bean devices can install it via workaround, Adobe recommends against doing so, as it doesn’t plan to offer security updates and bug fixes for existing versions of Flash for Android after September 2013, and attempting to run the plugin on Jelly Bean may result in “unpredictable behavior.”

The removal of Flash from Google Play comes as Adobe refocuses its mobile video efforts around HTML5, something the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs suggested it do years ago.

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too),” Jobs wrote in April of 2010 as the two companies battled over Web video standards, with Apple refusing to support Flash on its iOS devices. “Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Great idea, Steve!