14 DAY TRIAL // Soon after it announced that it planned on killing off the development of Flash Player for mobile devices, Adobe made available for download a new flavor of the software for devices that run under Google's Android operating system, as well as for the BlackBerry PlayBook.
The Flash Player is dead, make no mistake about it. However, do expect for Adobe to deliver more updates to the software released for the said mobile platforms.
After all, the company did commit to continue offering support for it and to provide users with updates on their devices.
“Adobe Flash Player 11.1.102.59 includes performance improvements and bug fixes related to security and stability,” the release notes for Flash in the Android Market read.
On Adobe's website, we can learn that the new software release comes along only with a series of device related enhancements, but with no major improvements and changes.
The changelog shows:
- Video Streaming issue on Samsung Galaxy S2. Audio plays, but no video - Enable 1080p video for NVidia Tegra 3 chipset based devices
From now on, we should see updates for Flash delivered only for devices that already enjoyed support for it, at least this is what Adobe announced.
In other words, only Android handset and tablets that pack “ARMv7 processor with Vector FPU, Minimum 550MHz, OpenGL ES2.0, H.264 & AAC H/W Decoders” will benefit from the technology.
At the moment, Flash for Android offers support for all OS versions starting with 2.2 (namely 2.2, 2.3, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2), and might not arrive on Ice Cream Sandwich devices.
However, with Adobe announcing plans to support HTML5 and with the technology making itself present on a wider array of handsets around, we're almost certain that Android users will not miss Flash that much in the end.
You can download the new Adobe Flash Player 11.1.102.59 from the Android Market here.