It"s the end of an era for Adobe and its Flash Player software ... sort of. As announced earlier this week, the company has issued its last major update for the web browser version of Flash Player for the Android operating system along with Research in Motion"s Blackberry Playbook tablet. The update, 11.1, is dedicated to fixing a number of bugs, mostly of the memory corruption variety.
While this is technically the final version of Flash Player for those platforms, Adobe has already confirmed via a blog post, "We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations." So people who have an Android smartphone shouldn"t be too worried at this point that the Flash Player software will be totally abandoned.
Indeed, Computerworld.com points out that Adobe"s Shockwave Player (Remember that? That takes us back a bit) was officially discontinued back in 2008 with the release of Shockwave Player 11. However, Adobe has continued to release security updates for that software ever since, including one this past week.
While Adobe plans to keep working on Flash Player for the PC platform as well as for the development of mobile applications (the company has confirmed that it is hard at work on Flash Player 12 as we speak), Adobe has already confirmed that as far as mobile web browsing, it will concentrate on the HTML5 platform for all future software development.