Adobe giving up on Flash for iPhone

Everyone who complains that the iPhone and iPad don't support Adobe Flash had better take a deep breath to keep up the volume: Adobe announced Wednesday that, after months of acrimony between it and Apple, it will no longer pursue plans to support Flash on those devices.

Apple's most recent volley against Flash was when it updated legalese last week regarding how iPhone applications could be developed — banning the use of "private" development tools and requiring iPhone applications to be written in a set group of programming languages. This excluded Adobe Flash and other languages, and set the stage for Apple to remove applications from the iTunes store that had been coded other ways.

In particular, this meant support for Flash on the iPhone was all but dead in the water unless Adobe could convince Apple to back down.

No such luck. Adobe's Mike Chambers, a senior Flash product manager, announced Wednesday in an angry blog post that the company is "not currently planning any additional investments" in Flash for the iPhone and iPad, and made clear that he thinks Apple has been petty and greedy in its repeated attempts to keep Flash off those devices. Chambers echoes what pundits have been saying for months: "They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms."

Flash support has regularly ranked as one of the most desired features on the iPhone platform, but Apple has long resisted as it pushes standards that are more within its control.

Chambers says Adobe is now going whole hog at Android, citing the success of the Motorola Droid and Nexus One cell phones and various Android-based tablets hitting the market this year. He calls a beta version of a Flash player for Android "very promising." Flash for other platforms — including Palm, Windows Phone 7, and even Blackberry — aren't out of the picture, either.

iPhone users have long suffered with the hopes and delusions that Flash would eventually come to the phone, just as they've hoped that the phone would eventually become available through Verizon. For years it seemed the former was inevitable. Now the latter seems far more likely.

So what does this do for current iPhone users and would-be purchasers of the device, now that Flash hopes are all but gone? Does this new reality make you less likely to buy an iPhone down the road — especially if other models can run Flash? Or will consumers eventually adapt and come to regard Flash as a non-necessity? They've lived without it for nearly three years, after all ...