Tons of fighting on both sides here, lots of names and childish arguments being thrown back and forth. Adobe says “Apple is being closed and evil by locking down their infrastructure”. Apple says “Adobe is lazy and annoying by refusing to give up on their archaic and flawed proprietary plugin”.

I’m going to take the high road here and call them both out. 

Apple, nobody is going to deny you your place on the mobile tower. You helped build it into what it is today, after all. At the same time, no good will come of locking down the App Store to the point where only a chosen few can make Apps. Yes, the Flash CS5 Compiler isn’t totally perfect and could probably make terrible Apps in the hands of a mediocre Flash programmer. But that’s true of just about any compiler. Let them continue to do their thing and maybe even give them a hand. After all, the more tools you give developers, the easier they can make great Apps for iDevices.

At the end of the day it’s not about the tools, it’s about the App Store. The more happy developers making great apps for your store, the better. You’ll need all the developers you can get if you want to continue beating Android.

Adobe, give up. Seriously, just give up. You’re a software company and that means you are, for the most part, at the mercy of hardware. If the hardware manufacturer (Apple) decides that certain ways of writing software are best for the device’s operation, then you have to accept that or at least be more diplomatic about it.

Sort of like how you’re writing CS5 natively in Cocoa for the Mac right now. You haven’t complained about that. Why are you complaining now? I believe you doth protest too much.

Update: After looking at some other articles on the subject, I really have to say that Apple is at least partially justified in their decision. Adobe is not a company that is known for their fast development cycle, or for quickly updating SDKs to utilize the latest features. Apple will inevitably release iPhone OS 5.0 and all the Flash developers using Flash CS5 Compiler would be powerless to include those features in their apps, waiting for Adobe to add them.

Adobe barely patches Creative Suite after the first few months; for example, Photoshop CS4 never got further than 11.0.1. They make a new CS and then rest on their laurels for a while and begin to develop the next one. They don’t seem to be interested in the continuity of product support. This would be a titanic problem for Apple, who constantly improves existing products through patches and updates.