The move is part of Adobe’s decision to discontinue development of Flash Player for mobile browsers. Instead, Adobe will focus on Flash for PCs and mobile apps packaged with Adobe AIR.
Effective Wednesday, access to Flash Player via Google Play is available "only for those devices that have Flash Player already installed. Devices that do not have Flash Player already installed are increasingly likely to be incompatible with Flash Player and will no longer be able to install it from the Google Play Store after August 15th”, Google explained.
In addition, in its version of Patch Tuesday, Adobe plugged a critical hole in Flash Player, along with critical bugs in Reader, Acrobat, and Shockwave Player. The Flash vulnerability could cause the plug-in to crash and enable an attacker to take control of the affected systems.
“There are reports that the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in limited targeted attacks, distributed through a malicious Word document. The exploit targets the ActiveX version of Flash Player for Internet Explorer on Windows”, Adobe warned.
Adobe also plugged critical holes in Reader and Acrobat that also could cause the software to crash and open up the affected system to being taken over by an attacker. However, for these vulnerabilities, there are no known exploits in the wild.
And Adobe fixed security holes in Shockwave Player that could enable an attacker to run malicious code on the affected system. Users for all of the Adobe products listed in the Tuesday advisory are urged to update their software.