Apple’s announcement today that it has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines has direct implications for Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool. This feature was created to enable Flash developers to quickly and easily deliver applications for iOS devices. The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.

This is great news for developers and we’re hearing from our developer community that Packager apps are already being approved for the App Store. We do want to point out that Apple’s restriction on Flash content running in the browser on iOS devices remains in place.

Adobe will continue to work to bring full web browsing with Flash Player 10.1 as well as standalone applications on AIR to a broad range of devices, working with key industry partners including Google, HTC, Microsoft, Motorola, Nokia, Palm/HP, RIM, Samsung and others.

September 9, 2010

Statement by Apple on App Store Review Guidelines

The App Store℠ has revolutionized the way mobile applications are developed and distributed. With over 250,000 apps and 6.5 billion downloads, the App Store has become the world’s largest mobile application platform and App Store developers have earned over one billion dollars from the sales of their apps.

We are continually trying to make the App Store even better. We have listened to our developers and taken much of their feedback to heart. Based on their input, today we are making some important changes to our iOS Developer Program license in sections 3.3.1, 3.3.2 and 3.3.9 to relax some restrictions we put in place earlier this year.

In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.

In addition, for the first time we are publishing the App Store Review Guidelines to help developers understand how we review submitted apps. We hope it will make us more transparent and help our developers create even more successful apps for the App Store.

The App Store is perhaps the most important milestone in the history of mobile software. Working together with our developers, we will continue to surprise and delight our users with innovative mobile apps.

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This new statement from Apple appears to remove the restriction on developers from using "non-approved" development suites (such as Flash) for creating iDevice apps. Woo! :)

Interesting, but using Flash/Frash does require jailbreaking the iPhone/iPad/iPod. I'm not sure how many i-devices owners are willing to jailbreak them, but I doubt that it's even as high as 10%.

Directly monetizing advertising on their hardware? Hmmm...

Steve Jobs writing about why Apple has not adopted the Flash plug-in on their mobile devices.

I think the video is a bit too froo-froo and bursting with hype that's so hyper that it comes across as a bit silly. There are a few out-of-date bits where they talk about Flash exporting to native apps for the iPhone and iPad.. guess there wasn't enough time for a re-edit before launch.