Flash Player 11.0 on Android -- Low on Space Message

Question

Ever since Flash Player 11.0 was released for the Android, and since it was automatically downloaded to my phone (HTC Incredible), I have been receiving a "Low on Space" message, with instructions to free up space for applications.  In researching this topic, I've found literally hundreds of posts with various solutions. I tried some of the suggestions, including moving my apps to the SD card; uninstalling apps I could do without; and clearing cache and data where possible.  After removing updates for Gmail, Flash Player, and another app, I believe I've narrowed the problem to Flash Player.  I was able to install the Gmail updates again with no message.  But, every single update from the defaulted Flash Player 10.1 to the new 11.0 causes the "Low on Space" message to appear.
So my question is, why is this version causing the message?  And then, is there a solution to keep the update and lose the message?
PS: In some of my research, folks have pointed to a 150 MB limit on apps in the Andoid OS.  This seems to be regardless of whether the app was moved to the SD card.
Any help on this is appreciated.

Answer 1

The OEM has configured the pre-installed applications on your device to auto-update.  The installation and update behavior is handled by the Android Market system.  We've researched the problem diligently, but there's not anything we can do from this side to prevent your device from requesting updates from the Android Market when they're available.
We have explored the option of enabling App2SD, but it is not a viable solution.
First and foremost, enabling App2SD does not work on Android 2.x devices where the application has already been pre-installed by the manufacturer.  The vast majority of users asking for App2SD are running the HTC Desire, or similar early-model Android phones with limited internal storage and have Flash Player pre-installed.  Enabling App2SD in our distribution won't help, because you still won't get the option to move it.
Furthermore, because Flash Player a browser plug-in and not a standalone app, enabling App2SD is a complex proposition and could cause your phone to become unstable in certain scenarios.  Flash Player is running inside of the Android Browser, and by extension, other applications that may be invoking the Android browser inside their applications.  When you plug your phone into USB to sync files, the SD card would unmount, and this could cause applications using Flash Player at the time to crash. 
To do this right, we would need additional improvements to the Android OS, which may or may not be feasible.  We will continue to work with Google to explore and prioritize our options in this regard.
There are unofficial workarounds to be found on various android forums that will let you enable App2SD today.  They suffer from the same stability problems, but they seem to work well-enough for a lot of people.  If you're desperate for internal storage space, that may be a good way to maximize the capabilities of your device's hardware.
With regard to the size of the binary distribution, until very recently, the architecture of the Android Market dictated that we could only serve a single binary that provides optimized video and multimedia playback on the hundreds of Android phones and tablets available (which are running a variety of GPU and CPU architectures, with each new architecture requiring it's own code paths and highly optimized inline assembly for performance-critical video and rendering tasks).  Interestingly, Android stores both the compressed and uncompressed copies of our installation on your device.  Our compressed size is about 5MB, and the uncompressed size is about 7MB, making the total footprint 12MB.
The size of the codebase itself is reflective of the complexity and fragmentation between the huge number of available Android devices and the rapid innovation on the part of phone and hardware manufacturers. 
We're very conscious of the distribution size and have really taken every step technically possible to reduce the size of the compressed and installed binaries.  We spend a lot of time and energy on keeping the player as small as it is.  Any additional trade-offs that we could make between file size would come at the expense of execution speed (we inline a lot of performance-critical code), which would negatively affect video and multimedia playback performance (and don't yield enough of an improvement to make the trade-off worthwhile).  We feel we've arrived at the right balance currently.
To give you some perspective, current well-equipped Android phone models ship with at least 1GB of internal phone storage.  In this context, Flash Player's 12MB footprint is negligible.  While we understand the impact on devices with minimal internal storage, there's not much else we can do for these phones at this time.