After the recent disturbances between Apple and Adobe over the iPhone maker’s highly restricted licensing terms, Adobe has decided to stop any further development of the Flash to iPhone packager tool, which is a part of CS5. As per Adobe’s Product Manager Mike Chambers, Apple’s ban on cross-compilation in the iPhone 4.0 SDK is absolutely unacceptable. In contrast to that, he says Adobe is closely working with Google to bring Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 to Android-powered mobile phones, as well as across other platforms like Palm, Windows Phone 7 and RIM.

Although Adobe will continue shipping the Flash packager (as a part of CS5) for the iPhone/iPad, as per Mike Chambers, “we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.” From Adobe’s perspective, this seems logical. But whether Flash is a must-have for all iPhone/iPad users is debatable from Apple’s perspective. The company recently released a list of websites which are “Flash-free”, an evidence of an attempt to shift users from being Flash-dependent. The company is also promoting HTML 5 to an extensive scale, which most iPhone/iPad users are content with. As per Steve Jobs, the recent licensing terms was implemented to preserve the quality of apps in the App Store. It will also allow developers to stay with the latest code base and access its new features. Of course this still does not quite explain Apple’s restrictive behavior.

Apple’s original clause as a part of the iPhone OS developer program states, “Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)”

[source: mikechambers.com ]