Flash Player back in UK Android app store, thanks to BBC

We thought it was dead and gone, with a stake through its black heart and its foul corpse incinerated in napalm, but Flash for Android has risen from its stinking grave to haunt us once more. And it’s all thanks to the BBC.

Auntie and other ‘strategic partners’ of Flash-spawner Adobe have put pressure on the company to make Flash Player 11 available in the UK once more — chiefly to support iPlayer on smart phones.

“Flash Player continues to be available on Google Play for users in the UK for a short while due to requests from strategic partners,” an Adobe bod told the Beeb. The company didn’t say when in the future the software would be cast back into the fiery depths of code hell where it belongs.

The app won’t work if you’re already on the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean — “FLASH PLAYER WILL NOT BE SUPPORTED ON ANY ANDROID VERSION BEYOND ANDROID 4.0.x,” the company screams on the download page.

I had a quick look at iPlayer on Chrome on a Galaxy S2 running 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich. It didn’t work. I downloaded the Flash Player and lo and indeed behold, it didn’t work. It still said, “To play this programme you need to download the Adobe Flash Player from the Android Market.” Never mind that it’s called the Google Play store now, I just did exactly that!

On Firefox the iPlayer site told me the most popular Android phone in existence was not on the list of supported devices. Finally I turned to the native Android browser (where I should have started, to be perfectly fair) and iPlayer worked just fine. Hooray!

Adobe pulled the plug on Flash in June, saying, “We have not continued developing and testing Flash player for this new version of Android and its available browser options.” It announced it was killing Flash for mobile devices back in November of last year, to focus on supporting HTML5.

Are you happy to see Flash back? Or are you rounding up a mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers, determined to see it gone, never to pollute your mobile countryside again? Start a riot in the comments, or over on our flashy Facebook page.

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