Steve Jobs directly answered the questions about Flash in one of his many interviews. In short, the overwhelming source of many malware infections and OS instability issues were directly tied back to Adobe Flash. Apple tried working with Adobe for over a decade to resolve these issues, and Adobe refused to cooperate.
In fact, the latest round of malware to affect the Mac OS are based on 3rd party exploits (Java being the latest).
Because Jobs realized that the iPhone would be used for very critical personal information (banking, booking airfare, hotels, email, texts) he decided that the iOS would be “Closed” and applications written for iOS would be “sandboxed”. Because HTML5 basically makes Adobe Flash obsolete, it made no sense to include Flash into iOS.
Adobe acknowledged this recently, and HTML5 is flourishing; largely driven by Apple’s refusal to utilize Flash.
Another key component that needs to be appreciated is the concept of Hardware Codec vs. Software Codecs. The iPad/iPhone/iPod natively does H.264 and .mp4 video - ONLY. Why? Because there is a portion of the A4/A5/A5+ chip that has a hardware video codec that can ONLY understand these video formats. Like a Blender in your kitchen, this section of the chip does one thing and one thing only. It can never - ever - do anything else. The plus is that it sips very little power to play your video or YouTube clip.
Software Codecs (as loaded on your laptop/desktop) can play virtually any format of video codec - and in doing so, consume tons of power in comparison. You see, as the video file is manipulated through the various combinatons of codecs - there are gazillions of memory read/write operations to perform this task. Each of these operations consumes some bit of power.
So, if the iPad supported Flash - not only would it be vulnerable to the hordes of malware exploits inherit in Flash, the battery life for playing videos would likely drop from 10 hours down to 2 hours.
I see and understand about that, but shouldn’t it be my choice if I wish to run an application regardless of how much risk there is in doing so?
So, while I like Apple products I don’t appreciate the fact they close their OS to my wanting to do something they feel is a threat.
I don’t like Gates thinking he’s my daddy anymore than Jobs (RIP) did or Apple does.
It’s why I’m rooting my phone to rid it of the Verizon apps they put on there with no way to remove.
I Pay for it, I decide what I want to use and if they make it impossible for me to use it as I see fit then I will buy from someone who is not so restrictive.