When the Samsung Galaxy Nexus launched last month there was much joy at the delicious new Ice Cream Sandwich OS, followed by howls of anguish as early adopters realised that the Adobe Flash plugin didn’t work on Android 4.0. Google promised that Flash support was on the way and Adobe has now released an ICS-compatible Flash plugin, just in time for the Galaxy Nexus’ US launch.
While this is welcome news for anyone hoping to run BBC iPlayer or embedded YouTube videos, we have to ask – is Flash still a vital service for Android or just a lazy crutch?
Flash is on the way out. Adobe knows it, which is why they announced last month that this would be the last version of Flash for mobile. Apple has seemingly known it for a bit longer and – useful though it can be – anyone who has had their mobile slow to a crawl due to a Flash-heavy page probably knows it too.
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We have to say, we are not that sorry. Support for Flash was one of Android’s trump cards against iOS, and being able to play inline videos when our iPhone-toting friends could not was cool, but the reality seldom lived up to the hype. HTML5 is now capable of doing almost everything that Flash can do and has the advantage of being indexable by search engines. Even Adobe has admitted defeat and is now working on tools to help Flash coders convert to HTML5.
It’s good to have Flash back on Android for one last shout, but Ice Cream Sandwich is such an improvement on earlier versions of the OS that we don’t think it needs to rely on support for such a buggy, outdated technology to compete with iOS any more. Do you? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.
You can download Adobe Flash Player 11 from the Android Market.
