Two day ago, Mike Chamber, Principal Product Manager at Adobe announced that there will not be any future investment in iPhone based Flash development.

This is the response after Apple put out a new draft of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.

Mike said:

We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.

Also, developers should expect that Apple will remove their over 100 Flash CS5 based applications currently in the iTunes Store.

The next Adobe’s move will be to focus on Android platform which grows and is getting stable and mature. This is why developers are advised to port their applications from iPhone to Android platform; and because Adobe announced that they are working closely with Google to bring both Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 on the Android platform.

In my opinion all sides have to loose because of Apple’s decision to ban third party APIs:

• Mobile users – Flash experience will be nonexistent, lots of web pages will display the Lego icon or will look like broken pages
• Developers – They’ll have to learn the agreed programming languages to deploy on iPhone
• Adobe – Loses a mobile platform
• Apple – Loses a part of mobile users, developers and credibility because Adobe has demonstrated that Flash Player is working well on mobile platforms alike iPhone.

In conclusion, Adobe switched to open platforms leaving Apple’s lock down platform behind, focusing on bringing the best experiences into Android platform.

Read more:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-flash-cs5-and-iphone-applications/
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362911,00.asp
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/21/1944256/Adobe-Stops-Development-For-iPhone