Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Why is Flash a problem in mobile phones

Everyone has been wondering why Apple refuses to put flash into their products. Personally, I believe it's the design of the flash plug-in that is holding Apple back.

As far as I understand, Adobe taps onto the operating system back-end in order to execute flash. That means that it needs to plant itself within the operating system before it can be installed. This is evident when you try to install Adobe Flash from the browser. You'll need administrator rights before you're able to install/update the flash player.

In my opinion, that would also be the reason why flash is pushed down to the Android OS via v2.2. The reason is because the Flash player becomes part of the Android OS (For Google's sake, I hope I'm wrong). Translated, any updates to the Flash player will result in a new Android OS version. I really hope that that isn't the case because if this is so, Android will soon have a lot of versions because Adobe Flash security updates are quite common. In fact among the vulnerabilities discovered in 2009 for web browser plug-ins, a vulnerability affecting both Adobe Reader and Flash Player was the second most attacked vulnerability.

If I'm a person that has created the product, I won't want to release a new version every time someone's else product (that was in-built into mine) has a security vulnerability. To me, that's bad press and gives a bad name to my product. I believe that's the number one reason why Flash will never be allowed onto the Apple platform. Apple has no control over the quality and would not want to risk pushing down updates to the iPhone OS just because Adobe has patched another security vulnerability (personal opinion).

That is unless Apple buys over Adobe. Then that's a different story altogether.

1 comment:

Rhinestic said...

Steve Jobs said Adobe is lazy....

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