We all knew this day was coming, but August 15th is finally here. From today Adobe are discontinuing Adobe Flash in the Google Play store. Before you all freak out, existing devices with Flash installed will continue to function as normal. Unfortunately any new devices will be unable to (easily) install flash.
While a lot of websites are moving to a post-Flash world and transitioning to HTML5 substitutes, there are plenty that still require it. While it is a new issue, it is something iOS users have dealt with for years and survived. It is actually a terrible user experience to hit a page that requires flash and not be able to play it.
The hard part here is Android users are used to having flash and now face a situation where they upgrade to a new phone and get less functionality. There’s still good reasons for using flash, like embedded Flickr galleries for example and there still remains a number of things HTML5 simply can’t do. Also development tools for HTML5 are still in really early stages and not intuitive to use.
That said, this change in direction from Adobe is happening, so we have no choice in the matter. Adobe say they will still push the occasional update (likely security related) to devices that currently have Flash.
More info @ Adobe.
