The Reason Why Android No Longer Supports Adobe Flash Player

If you’re a longtime  Android user, then you remember how much Google’s mobile operating system loved Flash. While Apple via world-famous CEO Steve Jobs publicly shunned Flash, Android embraced it from the start. While Jobs was busy writing his open letter stating that iOS will never ever in the history of ever be caught dead using Flash, Google was happy to welcome it in its family. Android let users and developers experiment with Flash and design all sorts of silly little games and animations.

How Flash Broke Android’s Heart

But then 2012 rolled around and Adobe broke Android’s heart. Adobe removed mobile support for Flash content via the Flash Player, and so any devices that run Android Jelly Bean or newer now function and load multimedia content via HTML5. Flash has bent the knee completely to HTML5 over the last few years, and now we all know that it will finally disappear. Adobe is finally ready to let Flash go for good and plans to phase it out completely by 2020.

This means that even browser that use Flash, the last standing bastion of this medium, will have to weed it out one by one until the year 2020. So, just three years from now, a big part of Internet history will die out completely. Adobe Flash Player was flawed from the beginning, but it was the best thing we had up to a certain point in Web history. So a lot of the content out there is designed in ActiveScript, the programming language behind Flash.

This means that the year 2020 will also bring a complete erasure of a huge part of what happened online before. And many people hate this, but we are all also relieved to see Flash finally die out in peace.