Over the past few days we’ve heard that Galaxy Nexus can’t install and run the Flash Player. That’s because Adobe was too slow to update it for Android 4.0, but it doesn’t mean that they will not support Android 4.0, like many people thought.
Adobe has said before that they will stop further developing the Flash Player for mobile devices, but they will continue to support the current Flash software for Android and other platforms. However, everyone should remember that Adobe will be slowly deprecating the Flash player, so eventually it will stop working anyway.
In fact it looks like they won’t support it anymore for Android 5.0, which should be launched next fall. We just have to accept the idea that Flash will be gone from mobile devices, and hope that HTML5 will be there to replace it by the time Flash stops working on mobile devices for good.
I think a whole year is enough time for the HTML5 to take over and replace Flash completely, and I think the reason Adobe is finally giving up on it, too, is because they know Google, their strongest ally against Apple and the “no-Flash” attitude, has decided to also help replace Flash.
Android is becoming the most popular OS in the world, thanks to the billions of people that will buy smartphones in the next few years, and considering at least 1 in 2 of those smartphones will be powered by Android, so it’s not very smart to fight against Google. They also own the most popular video site in the world, Youtube, and I believe next year they will start setting WebM as the default codec for their videos, with a fallback to h.264 or Flash. When they do that, there will be a huge movement online towards WebM videos, and a lot of other sites will do it, too.
Flash may not be dead yet, but all the signs are showing its death is imminent. Plus, it’s for the best. The video decoding technology will be much better and less buggy once it’s decentralized and implemented by multiple browser vendors, rather than a single company like Adobe.