Adobe’s Flash Player isn’t available to download through the Play Store anymore, but if you have a browser that’s compatible and you can sideload an app, you can still get Flash content on your Android-powered smartphone or tablet.

Before we go into the details on just how you can do that, let’s dispel some myths and clear up some confusion.

Myth: Android isn’t compatible with Flash

Yes it is. Flash runs just fine on Android.

Myth: Android doesn’t support Flash

Yes and no. Adobe withdrew support for Android not too long ago — and they never really supported iOS at all. It’s not so much that “Android doesn’t support Flash”, rather “Flash doesn’t support Android”… though that isn’t entirely true either.

Adobe, the people who make Flash, decided to shift their focus from Flash-based technologies to open technologies. HTML5, for example, can do everything the Flash Player can do — developers have just taken their own sweet time converting over to HTML5 from Flash.

So Adobe could focus more on their “standards” direction they discontinued development of and support for their Flash Player plugin on Android — and pulled it from the Play Store. Google, however, hasn’t kept up with support for the Flash plugin in their Chrome browser on Android — why should they? Adobe doesn’t support it anymore. Even if you get Flash on your Android, Chrome probably won’t let you use the plugin.

The Firefox browser (and presumably others), however, still work with the Flash Player plugin.

Myth: You can’t get the Flash Player for Android any more

Sure you can! At the time of this writing, Adobe still has a web page where you can download many different versions of the Flash installer for Android: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html

Simply download whichever .apk is best suited for your device, and install it. As long as you can sideload apps and have allowed installation from “unknown sources”, Flash will install just fine! After that, simply launch Firefox, head to your favorite Flash-enabled site, and tap on whatever Flash component you want to run. It’s just that easy!