It's Official: Adobe Flash support will be built into Android 2.2

10 months. That’s how long its been since Adobe first demonstrated Flash on Android — and that’s pretty much a lifetime in the mobile world. And yet, official Flash support for Android is still nowhere to be seen*. Do these people not understand that I have virtual fish to feed and e-crops to tend?

While we still don’t have an exact date, we do know which version of Android it’ll be coming in: the next one.

In an interview with the New York Times, Chief Android Architect Andy Rubin made it official: Android 2.2, otherwise known as the “Froyo” build (with the latest device-ready build being 2.1, otherwise known as “Eclair”), will have Flash support built in. This goes hand-in-hand with Adobe’s previous indications that Flash for Android would be available sometime in the second half of this year.

Alas, it’s still not clear which already existing devices will be upgradable to 2.2, nor whether or not all upgradable devices will play friendly with Flash.

*HTC has snuck Flash support into a few of their Sense-enabled devices — but it’s not exactly.. optimal. With video playback rates at around 2-3 frames per second and an overall feel of chunky crashiness, I certainly hope the official Google/Adobe implementation is quite a bit better.