Following up, reports have surfaced from the UK release of the Galaxy Nexus that have confirmed that the phone is shipping without mobile Flash capability, with no way to force compatibility via earlier versions, as the mobile Flash players for Honeycomb, Gingerbread and Froyo have also been confirmed to be incompatible with Ice Cream Sandwich.
For its part, Google has released this statement regarding the lack of Flash support on the Galaxy Nexus and Ice Cream Sandwich as a whole:
 “Flash hasn’t been released for ICS yet so as far as we know, Adobe will support Flash for ICS.â€
The discovery of the lack of Flash support on Android 4.0 follows the surprise announcement of the immediate halt to mobile Flash development made by Adobe earlier this month, which included halting in-house development of mobile Flash for multiple platforms, including Android.
However, Adobe made explicit mention that the halt to mobile Flash development would not affect those that have their own licenses to the platform, such as RIM who confirmed continuing development for Flash on its PlayBook tablet outside of Adobe’s own development as well as the commitment to open source the platform so that others can continue development if necessary.
This would mean that if Adobe were to not make Flash for Ice Cream Sandwich available for whatever reason directly, Google and/or Samsung could take up development for the Galaxy Nexus and Android 4.0, provided the investment in development makes sense and enough demand exists to justify it, as well as the availability of licenses to develop compatibility to begin with.
As Adobe is moving to HTML5 development on mobile after years of touting Flash on Android as the superior alternative to the iPhone with mixed results, this puts the onus on both hardware manufacturers and software developers to speed up the transition away from Flash on Android, although it won’t happen without a loud minority refusing to give up Flash for the sake of a bullet point advantage over the perceived inferiority of Apple’s iOS and iPhone/iPad, which was the catalyst for Adobe making the move to abandon Flash on mobile in the first place.
