Almost a year ago, Adobe bragged about the first demos of Flash on Android. Fast-forward to today, and Flash on Android phones is still MIA. Perhaps the whole Apple and Adobe Flash clash made us forget that other phones were no better at supporting Flash, either–at least not yet.
Sometime later this year though, the situation should change. Google’s Andy Rubin, the lead engineer behind the Android OS, said that “full support” for Flash is coming in Froyo, the code-name for version 2.2 of Android. Note that this statement, as reported in the NYT interview, was paraphrasing Rubin, rather than a direct quote.
Rubin didn’t give away any details as to which Android phones will be upgradable to version 2.2, or when exactly Froyo will arrive, so many older models could be left in the dust, without proper Flash support. Hopefully, the implementation of Flash on Android 2.2 will be a better experience than the Adobe/HTC Flash partnership on the Hero model, which is slow and unreliable at times.
Through this partnership with Google, Adobe is putting its mobile future in the hands of Google. When Apple effectively banned Flash from the iPhone OS earlier this month, Adobe vouched to concentrate its efforts on developing for Android devices.
Rubin also took a covert stab at Apple’s reluctance to support Flash on its mobile platform and closed eco-system, saying that being open “means not being militant about the things consumer are actually enjoying.”
“When they can’t have something, people do care. Look at the way politics work. I just don’t want to live in North Korea,” Rubin said in the interview.