Adobe Access Protection on iOS devices?

Question

I am having an issue in terms of Adobe Access not supported in iOS. I have been developing a custom player along with a bunch of other back end Adobe Technologies only to find out now that protection is not available in iOS.
DRMManager.isSupported returns false when we test the app in iOS Simulator. DRMManager.isSupported returns true when we use Air Simulator.
I am using OS X 10.9, AIR SDK 4.0, Apache Flex 4.11.0, and Xcode 5.02, and Flash Builder 4.7.
This is a huge problem and amounts to false advertisement because the protection is supposed to be handled by Adobe AIR which is supposed to be uniform across platforms. If protection is not supported on iOS, then the appeal of write one code for multiple platforms is not there any more.
I don't understand why protection is not uniformly supported if the same Adobe Air is installed on both iOS and Android devices. I also don't understand why HDS is supported on Android but not on iOS devices. It makes no sense. The whole reason for using Adobe AIR is to not have to deal with the specifics of each platform.
We were supposed to go live on Jan 1st, but had to postpone to deal with several issues. Now it seems that we may have to reevaluate the decision to use Adobe technologies altogether.
Any suggestions from Adobe would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Your comments on point 3 are sobering and kind of a slap in the face to someone who has been developing a streaming app with the idea that Adobe Air has  99% reach in the desktop and mobile market. I went back to the Http Dynamic Streaming and Adobe Access pages to find the restrictions that I missed when I was deciding on the technologies to use.
The only hint of not being able to use HDS or OSMF on iOS was the omission that Adobe Access protection could be delivered via Adobe Air on iOS devices as shown in the first image below of the Adobe Access technical specs.
On the other hand, there all kinds of statements and illustrations that would make you believe otherwise, especially on mobile devices.
No explicit statement can be found that says that HLS is the only way to stream content to iOS devices, that the OSMF framework is HLS agnostic, and that one has to build an iOS native app from scratch if they want to consume protected HLS. I guess not smth you want to put on a page where you want to market a product.
In building a native app, how do I make up for the lost functionality that comes by default with AIR such as the integration of Adobe Access in AIR, DRM Management, SWF verification, etc.
As it stands, the OSMF framework is a half-baked solution as it cannot be used on iOS devices because it is HLS agnostic….although some folks have written plugins to enable OSMF to consume HLS.
I  am currently testing a plugin to see if I can consume protected HLS. If I fail then I will scrap the entire project…which also means not buying Adobe Access or Adobe Media Servers. Neither will I be looking at Adobe Primetime.
My OSMF based app is able to consume HLS content when I debug in AIR Simulator. Testing on iOS simulator or iOS devices has yet to prove successful. Something breaks inside AIR when it is compiled using iOS SDK.
The reason why I chose Adobe technologies is because it seemed like all the pieces were there to put together a streaming solution that fit my business model. I did not want to have to write everything and Adobe technologies promised a quick time to market. Now 7 months later I am finding out that perhaps I should have read the Adobe Access technical specs with the precision of a lawyer.
In my testing, protected content cannot be consumed in AIR unless DRMManager class is available. In help.adobe.com we read the following:
“The DRMManager manages the retrieval and storage of the vouchers needed to view DRM-protected content. With the static DRMManager.getDRMManager() method, you can access the existing DRMManager object to perform the following DRM-management tasks:
Preload vouchers from a media rights server, using a DRMContentData object.
Query the local cache for an individual voucher, using a DRMContentData object.
Reset all vouchers (AIR only)
AIR profile support: This feature is supported on all desktop operating systems and AIR for TV devices, but it is not supported on mobile devices. You can test for support at run time using the DRMManager.isSupported property.”
Using OSMF 2.0 framework, I have been able to take advantage of both PHDS and Adobe Access protection schemes in my Flex based app running on Adobe Air on Android. In Android Devices, DRMManager .isSupported returns true.
In iOS, it seems to be a whole different story. As I said in my first post, DRMManager.isSupported returns false when testing via iOS Simulator but returns true when testing via Air Simulator.  So the attack vector idea that you put forward cannot stand because if that was true it would require DRMManager.isSupported to be false in all debugging scenarios not just on iOS Simulator or iOS devices.
The behavior of the app in iOS simulator and Air Simulator is not consistent when it comes to responding to touch based events and rendering visual elements as well. Performance and functionality degrades even more when testing directly on iOS devices. All iOS devices exhibit the same symptoms. For example, trying to select a list item is almost impossible….item renderers simply do not respond when one tries to select an item.
No such symptoms or differences exist between AIR Simulator and Android devices. So, it seems to me that there are AIR to iOS compilation issues when a mobile air app is packaged through iOS SDK. Smth brakes inside of AIR during packaging. I believe that this is the reason why DRMManager.isSupported returns false when testing app in iOS simulator and devices.