The Android market will never be the same again once Adobe Flash Player support and Android OS version 2.2 are released. Adobe has announced that Flash 10.1 for Android OS will be released in a developer preview at Google’s I/O conference later this month. Google I/O is an annual event that features technical matters involving Google products. This year’s event is expected to feature more than 80 meetings, more than three thousand application developers, and more than 100 new products. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and Android OS 2.2 are likely to be among them. While not officially announced, Android OS 2.2 is expected by many attendees at Google I/O because Google has already said that the new version of Android would natively support Flash.

Earlier, Adobe said that its Flash player would run on devices such HTC handsets as Incredible and the Nexus One, but not on Hero or Droid Eros. The application is said to require at least 50 megabytes of available system memory and the Cortex A8 processor from ARM. The announcement was made at the Mobile World Congress gathering in Barcelona in February. At that time, Adobe pledged to port its Adobe Flash player to smartphones made by all manufacturers, except for Apple. An encapsulated version of Flash, Adobe Air, is expected to debut for use on smartphones later in the year.

While the tech world is rich with the excitement concerning Flash support for mobile devices, don’t look for anyone at Apple to be cheering its release. At the end of last month, under withering criticism for Apple’s failure to support Flash on the Apple iPhone and Apple iPad products, Apple CEO Steve Jobs leveled a blistering attack on Adobe, criticizing it for being a closed proprietary system. Adobe has accused Apple of refusing to support Flash in effort to force users to buy proprietary apps from the Apple store to enable video. There are other contentions between the two companies, indicating that they are quite a distance away from reconciliation.

With the Release of Android OS 2.2 at the end of May, analysts expect smartphones equipped with Flash to be hitting the Android Market by the end of June.

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