Adobe Flash on the Nexus 7 and other Jelly Bean Devices

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As those of us lucky enough to be running Jelly Bean have found out, Adobe Flash isn’t officially supported. While many no longer care about the dying technology, quite a few of us still have use for it.

XDA Recognized Contributor stempox has found that by simply side-loading the APK, users are able to view media content as always through the native Android browser app. From there, users simply have to enable plugins in the browser settings, as was done in previous versions of Android.

Naturally, this will not work with Chrome Browser, which doesn’t support plugins and has supposedly replaced Browser as the default web browser on the platform. However, since Browser still comes as the default browser on the Galaxy Nexus and (presumably the Nexus S), this still has the potential to help quite a few.

For those running the Google Nexus 7, which does not come preloaded with Browser, you must manually install Browser. Luckily, this is also possible, thanks to a guide written by XDA Forum Member Censura_Umbra. In order to accomplish this, users need to copy over Browser.apk to /system/app using a root-enabled file manager and modify its permissions accordingly. Afterward, users have to remove or rename a couple of files that would otherwise cause issues with the app. What about Flash? According to XDA Forum Member NeoMagus, Flash content works just fine when installing Browser this way. Alternatively, users have reported that side-loading the latest version of Firefox browser works as well.

To get started, head over to the Adobe Flash and Nexus 7 Browser installation threads.