No Flash Support for Android 4.1

No big surprise here, but Adobe has announced that it will not be supporting Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with Flash Player. Since Adobe announced it was abandoning all mobile efforts for the Flash Player last fall, that's hardly a surprise.

But, while there will be no more Flash Player updates for mobile, people have still been free to install it from the Play Store and the plugin still came pre-installed on plenty of devices.

This will no longer be the case, Adobe will start disabling installs on devices that haven't supported Flash from the get go. Older devices will still receive updates, as long as they are issued, and be able to grab the Flash Player app, but not if they upgrade to Android 4.1.

This was inevitable, but Adobe has a good explanation of why it's doing it now. New devices, that come with Android 4.1 in particular, will not be certified to run Flash. There will be no testing done and Android 4.1 was built under the assumption that Flash on mobile is dead.

As such, problems are very likely to arise, problems that will not get fixed since neither Adobe, nor Google nor the manufacturers are supporting Flash on these devices. To prevent this, Adobe will simply be blocking these devices from installing the Flash Player app from the Play Store.

The same is true for devices that started with Android 4.0 and will get updated to 4.1 so Adobe is recommending that you uninstall Flash Player if you plan to upgrade, just to make sure no problems creep up.

"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. 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 August 15th," Adobe announced.