You can’t say you didn’t see it coming! Adobe have officially given up on any kind of development efforts for Flash and Flash tools for the iPhone, just days after announcing that a public beta of Flash is planned for Android.

After months of trying to convince Apple to allow Flash on the iPhone OS, Adobe banked big on its ‘Packager for iPhone’ application which was supposed to ship with the CS5 suite released a few days ago. This program converted Flash applications into iPhone ones allowing developers to easily submit their apps to the App Store.

Neither Flash nor the announcement of the Flash to iPhone converter made Apple too happy, who changed their developer rules in their iPhone OS 4.0 to lock down developers to “Objective-C, C++ or JavaScript” only.

With this seemingly being the last straw for Adobe, as well as threats of lawsuits between the companies, Mike Chambers, Principal Product Manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe, wrote of how Apple’s changes to its developer agreement will prevent the submission of all apps created using not only Flash CS5, but all other cross-compiling applications available. Mentioning the Android platform, he goes on to say

“Fortunately, the iPhone isn’t the only game in town. Android based phones have been doing well behind the success of the Motorola Droid and Nexus One, and there are a number of Android based tablets slated to be released this year. We are working closely with Google to bring both Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR 2.0 to these devices, and thus far, the results have been very promising…

Personally, I am going to shift all of my mobile focus from iPhone to Android based devices (I am particularly interested in the Android based tablets coming out this year) and not focus on the iPhone stuff as much anymore.”

With Apple abandoning any form of Flash support on the iPhone OS, the ball is very much in Adobe’s court to ensure that Flash runs great on Android. Hopefully, we’ll be seeing more Flash games ported to the platform in the near future, and full Flash support for the Android browser too, as expected in the next Android version (Froyo)!

Of course, if Apple doesn't want you to run Flash on the iPhone, you could always run Android on it instead and wait for full Flash support.

Source: Macworld