A brief look at application installer issues: why admin?

An engineer from Adobe explains why some Adobe installers require administrative privileges. Jamie Pruden writes:

"OS X is a new animal for many Mac OS users. As such, we anticipated that most users would want to utilize Adobe's applications the same way that they did in OS 9: install once and anyone on that computer can use the application.

Mac OS X tries to please both the UNIX hackers and the Mac OS fanatics. The result of this decision is the duplication of many of the folders from the old System Folder. We used to put common components in the "Application Support" folder. OS X has two standard Application Support folders with an option for another.

Consider this scenario: A user installs an Adobe application normally, but under the Admin account. In this case, some items are loaded into the user area and some into the Applications folder. If a second user (using a different account) later goes to the same computer and tries to run the application, it won't work since some of the files are in first user account.

Our compromise was to force installing as an admin so that we could install items into the common areas of the machine. This way one installation can be utilized by multiple users. For most of our OOS X applications, we install into the following locations:

/Applications
/Library/Application Support/Adobe

(and if present)
System Folder/Application Support
System Folder/Preferences

For those that are curious about these things, you can go into Terminal, navigate to /, and do an ls -l on the Library directory. Standard users cannot write to this location. Admins can. However, everyone can read from this location, so our goal of making sure everyone can run the program is accomplished."