“We want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen,” Jobs says. “Everyone wins—we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform.”

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Lynch wasted no time in responding. “The primary issue at hand is that Apple is choosing to block Adobe’s widely used runtimes as well as a variety of technologies from other providers,” Lynch writes in his blog. “We feel confident that were Apple and Adobe to work together as we are with a number of other partners, we could provide a terrific experience with Flash on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.”

The Adobe CTO refers to the legal terms that Apple “has imposed on developers” in the latest draft of its iPhone developer program license and added that Adobe is already shifting its focus away from the iPhone and iPad for both Flash Player and AIR. “We are working to bring Flash Player and AIR to all the other major participants in the mobile ecosystem, including Google, RIM, Palm (soon to be HP), Microsoft, Nokia, and others,” he says.

Mike Chambers, the principal product manager for developer relations for the Flash Platform at Adobe, says in his blog that Apple’s restrictions will have “the effect of restricting applications built with a number of technologies, including Unity, Titanium, MonoTouch, and Flash CS5.” He also says that developers “should be prepared for Apple to remove existing content and applications… created with Flash CS5 from the iTunes store.”

Also, the “primary goal of Flash has always been to enable cross browser, platform and device development. The cool Web game that you build can easily be targeted and deployed to multiple platforms and devices,” Chambers says. “However, this is the exact opposite of what Apple wants. They want to tie developers down to their platform, and restrict their options to make it difficult for developers to target other platforms.”

“It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps. And Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms,” Jobs says, adding that “although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago when they shipped CS5. Adobe was the last major third-party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X.”

Both companies have worked together before. In fact, Jobs notes that Apple was a supporter of Adobe back when its founders “were in their proverbial garage,” owning about 20% of the company for many years. However, Jobs now says “Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

“We look forward to delivering Flash Play 10.1 for Android smart phones as a public preview at Google I/O in May, and then a general release in June,” Lynch says. “From that point on, an ever-increasing number and variety of powerful, Flash-enabled devices will be arriving, which we hope will provide a great landscape of choice.”

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